Sunday, February 15, 2009

Sen. Bennett reintroduces Social Security reform plan

The Deseret News
reports that Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) has reintroduced his plan to reform Social Security. Bennett said:

"We are literally facing a retirement tsunami with the number of retirees projected to increase by 75 percent between 2010 and 2030. This legislation would ensure that our children and grandchildren will receive roughly the same level of benefits when they retire as current retirees do today, and we can do this without raising taxes."

The Bennett plan has three parts:

  • First, speed up the currently-legislated increase in the full retirement age from 65 to 67;
  • Second, once the age 67 retirement age increase is achieved, index benefits to future changes in life expectancies;
  • Third, introduce "progressive indexing," which would provide progressive reductions in benefit growth for future cohorts of retirees.

Together, these steps could be expected to keep the program solvent over the long term. Here's a link to the SSA actuaries' analysis of the 2006 version of Bennett's plan.

1 comment:

William Larsen said...

Sen. Bennett’s plan ignores one important fact. When you look at a 75 time horizon for Social Security it includes what exactly? It includes all the payroll taxes paid by everyone over that period of time and includes all the benefits paid to those who are eligible to receive benefits over that time. The key problem is that those paying in over 75 years are not the same ones who receive the benefits. If you exclude those who payroll taxes of those who are not eligible for benefits within the 75 year time horizon, then you have a real mess.

What this plan actually does is continue the ponzi game on all future generations. It requires the children to pay for the sins of their parents who KNEW that SS was paying benefits far in excess of what could be paid based on accrual accounting. Our parents and grandparents ignored the warnigns in 1950, 1955, 1957 1965, 1970, 1983 when Social Security went back to congress to tax us more, increase our retirement age and begin taxing benefits.

When will it stop? Can anyone just say no?