President Ronald Reagan signing 1983 legislation that he negotiated with the House’s top Democrat, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., behind his left shoulder, to preserve Social Security.CreditCreditGetty Images
On June 12, 2019, Jeff Sommer writes in the Business Section of The New York Times:
A slow-moving crisis is approaching for Social Security, threatening to undermine a central pillar in the retirement of tens of millions of Americans.
Next year, for the first time since 1982, the program must start drawing down its assets in order to pay retirees all of the benefits they have been promised, according to the latest government projections.
Unless a political solution is reached, Social Security’s so-called trust funds are expected to be depleted within about 15 years. Then, something that has been unimaginable for decades would be required under current law: Benefit checks for retirees would be cut by about 20 percent across the board.
“Old people not getting the Social Security checks they have been promised? That has been unthinkable in America — and I don’t think it will really happen in the end this time, because it’s just too horrible,” said Alicia Munnell, the director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. “But action has to be taken to prevent it.”
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While the issue is certain to be politically contentious, it is barely being talked about in Washington and at 2020 campaign events. The last time Social Security faced a crisis of this kind, in the early 1980s, a high-level bipartisan effort was needed to keep retirees’ checks whole. Since that episode, the program has often been called “the third rail of American politics” — an entitlement too dangerous to touch — and it’s possible that another compromise could be reached in the current era.
Benefit cuts would be devastating for about half of retired Americans, who rely on Social Security for most of their retirement income. A survey released in May by the Federal Reserve found that a quarter of working Americans had saved nothing for retirement.
The shrinking of Social Security’s assets expected in 2020 would mark a significant change in the program’s cash flow, one that could complicate Americans’ retirement planning — even for the many relatively affluent citizens for whom Social Security is still a major source of income in old age.
“Fifteen years is really just around the corner for people planning their retirements,” said John B. Shoven, a Stanford economist who is also affiliated with the Hoover Institution and the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“The cuts that are being projected would be terrible for a lot of people,” he said. “This needn’t happen and it shouldn’t happen, but we’ve known about these problems for a long time and they haven’t been solved. They’re getting closer.”
Social Security has a long-known basic math problem: more money will be going out than coming in. Roughly 10,000 baby boomers are retiring each day, with insufficient numbers of younger people entering the work force to pay into the system and support them.
And life expectancy is increasing. By 2035, Social Security estimates, the number of Americans 65 or older will increase to more than 79 million, from about 49 million now. If the program has not been repaired, they will encounter a much poorer Social Security than the one seniors rely on today.Representative John Larson and Senator Richard Blumenthal discussing their Social Security legislation at a senior center in Bristol, Connecticut.CreditMonica Jorge for The New York Times
How cuts would affect a typical person
Under current law, cuts would start in 2034, when the main trust fund is expected to be depleted, or in 2035, if Congress authorizes Social Security to pay old-age benefits through the Disability Insurance Trust Fund.
Consider a woman with average annual earnings of $51,795 (in current dollars) over the course of her career, who retires at age 67 in 2037. The latest Social Security study indicates that she will be entitled to $27,366 in inflation-adjusted benefits. But if the trust fund shortfall has not been remedied, Social Security would be permitted to pay her only $21,669 — a 21 percent cut.
Nearly every older American would be affected, but those at the lowest income levels would be hurt the most. Social Security benefits are progressive, providing greater assistance for those with greater need. A worker with average career earnings of $12,949 until 2037 is entitled to receive the equivalent of 75.6 percent of that income, but with mandatory cuts, this person would have to survive on just 59.9 percent, the Social Security report says.
According to a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 9 percent of all retirees lived in poverty in 2017 — but the figure would have been 39 percent if not for Social Security.
For African Americans, the study found, the anti-poverty effect has been even greater: 19 percent lived in poverty, but 52 percent would have done so if they had not received Social Security payments. For Hispanics, the numbers were 17 percent and 46 percent.
The reductions of roughly 20 percent on average are just a starting point. If current laws are unchanged and current economic projections remain intact, the cuts would rise to 25 percent in later years, a New York Times analysis of Social Security data indicates.
Unless Congress and the White House reach an agreement before the trust funds are emptied, most Americans will face hard choices: delaying retirement and working longer if they can, or simply surviving on less.
The Social Security mess already complicates some commonly accepted retirement-planning wisdom — such as the advice to delay claiming benefits until age 70.
People who do so are entitled to an 8 percent annual increase in benefits. That makes Social Security “the best annuity that money could buy,” said Wade Pfau, a professor of retirement income at the American College of Financial Services, in a 2015 report. But he redid his calculations at the request of The Times, and for workers who are 55 now, statutory benefit cuts just when they turn 70 could make that approach far less attractive, Professor Pfau said.
The ‘third rail’
Cutting the Social Security checks of people in retirement is, to say the least, politically dangerous.
David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s budget director, tried to do just that in 1981. What happened in that episode gives some clues for a possible solution today.
Like other conservatives of that era, Mr. Stockman viewed Social Security as a form of “closet socialism” that needed to be scaled back. With the program facing a solvency crisis, he proposed immediate reductions in retirees’ benefits.
Older Americans rebelled, and members of Congress listened to them. “I just hadn’t thought through the impact of making it effective immediately,” Mr. Stockman observed ruefully in his 1986 book, “The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed.”Rosly Ray in a Social Security Administration video kiosk room at a public library in Quincy, Florida, last year.CreditMark Wallheiser for The New York Times
A nimble politician, Reagan rejected Mr. Stockman’s recommendations and formed a bipartisan commission to study the issue. Ultimately, Reagan reached a long-term agreement with the Democratic speaker of the House, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., who viewed the preservation of Social Security as essential.
While they made no immediate cuts in Social Security checks, they reduced benefits in more subtle ways, using measures that are still being used, like gradually delaying the standard retirement age from 65 to 66, where it stands today, and eventually to 67.
Taxes increased, too — bolstering cash flows and creating the trust fund surpluses that have given retirees and current politicians some breathing room.
But in ways large and small, the Reagan-O’Neill Social Security fix is coming undone. Notably, the hefty balances in those trust fund accounts today — some $2.9 trillion — may be having an unintended consequence.
“The trust fund surpluses were intended to provide a buffer that would give politicians enough time to show some fiscal responsibility,” said Robert D. Reischauer, a former Social Security trustee who was also head of the Congressional Budget Office and is now president emeritus of the Urban Institute. “But the problem is that without an immediate crisis, the politicians don’t have to act. And really, they would rather sleep. So when the crisis eventually comes, as it will, it is likely to be much, much worse because of the delay.”
John Cogan, a professor of public policy at Stanford, said Social Security’s fundamental problem was that benefits had been rising faster than revenue. Cuts, he said, will be unpalatable but inevitable.
“The solution, I think, is to slow the growth in real benefits promised to future recipients,” he said.
Democrats in Congress have suggested an increase in Social Security benefits, accompanied by higher taxes for the wealthy. In combination, the bill’s various measures would eliminate the program’s financial shortfall, according to projections by Stephen C. Goss, the chief actuary of Social Security.
Conservatives continue to push for sharp reductions in the size of Social Security as well as Medicare, saying the United States can’t afford the growing burden of the two “entitlement programs.”
“Entitlement programs in the United States have expanded more than tenfold since their inception, but workers are nowhere near 10 times better off as a result,” the Heritage Foundation said in a May 20 policy proposal. The conservative think tank favors cuts to benefits and siphoning money from payroll taxes into individual investment accounts. That echoes an initiative that President George W. Bush once embraced but Democrats blocked.
There are no signs of an imminent breakthrough, though Professor Cogan said that, as in the past, the impending prospect of benefit cuts “is likely to change the political atmosphere and make it possible to find a compromise.”
But Mr. Reischauer fears that, given the current acrimony of American politics, there will be no compromise until the last minute.
“We will need a combination of increased taxes and reduced benefits, undoubtedly,” he said. “But if we wait, the deficits will only grow and the eventual solution will be much more painful.”
Gary Reber Comments:
“Retirement” is increasingly becoming a misnomer.
For those who have been dependent on employment and/or welfare, the problem is that financially sustainable retirement is and will no longer be a reality. Even with Social Security, which is funded through payroll taxes called the Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax (FICA) and/or Self Employed Contributions Act Tax, (SECA), one must have had a job to be eligible for the entitlement––and the amount of Social Security is based on the income level generated from one’s employment record of payroll tax contributions.
Employer-provided pensions continue to decrease and personal savings is not the norm among the vast majority of American households who must spend virtually every earned dollar on living expenses. In reality, nearly one-half the population of the United States is living on poverty incomes.
While increasingly individuals are finding it necessary to continue working in retirement to supplement their income, most older Americans discontinue full-time career work and struggle to meet obligations with minimum-pay part- and full-time jobs, even multiple jobs. A proportion of retirees also receive income from welfare programs, such as Supplemental Security Income and other life-support services funded through tax extraction and government debt.
This perspective should serve as the “reality” from which to explore prospects for effectively dealing with eroding retirement security.
Proposals by both Democrat and Republican political parties thus far rely on the requirement to reduce consumption in the economy at a time when what is needed is expansion of the economy supported by increased, but environmentally responsible consumption.
As my colleague Michael D. Greaney at the Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.org) states, “under the prevailing Keynesian paradigm, of course, ‘saving’ is always defined as the excess of income over consumption. If you want to save, then, the iron assumption of Keynesian economics is that you must consume less.”
The American consumer is being put into an impossible situation of being asked to consume more to drive the economy and reduce saving, and at the same time are being told they must reduce consumption dramatically in order to accumulate sufficient savings for retirement.
Of course, the whole problem would go away if we financed both retirement and wealth-creating, income-producing physical productive capital needs out of “future savings,” thereby increasing the capacity to consume and support the economy while simultaneously building financial security for every American citizen.
A far better and productive approach would be to create a new way for working and non-working Americans to start their own retirement savings: MyCHA. CHA stands for Capital Homestead Account. It would be a super-IRA or asset tax shelter for citizens. The Treasury should start creating an asset-backed currency that will enable every child, woman and man to establish a CHA at their local bank to acquire a growing, full-earning payout dividend-bearing stock portfolio comprised of newly-issued stock representative of viable American growth corporations, both established and start-ups, to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income.
We can create new asset-backed money for investment through the existing but dormant Section 13(2) rediscount mechanism of each of the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks that would be backed by “future savings” (that is, future profits from higher levels of marketable goods, products, and services).
The CHA would function as a savings and income account that effectively would build a nest egg over time, using interest-free, insured capital credit loans. A CHA would be offered to EVERY American, whether employed or not. Of course, those employed may also have additional opportunities to acquire personal ownership in their companies using an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) trust financial mechanism.
The CHA would process an equal allocation of productive credit to EVERY citizen exclusively for purchasing full-dividend payout shares in companies needing funds for growing the economy and private sector jobs for local, national and global markets. The shares would be purchased on credit wholly backed by projected “future savings” in the form of new productive capital assets as well as the future marketable products and services produced by the newly added technology, renewable energy systems, plant, rentable space and infrastructure added to the economy. Risk of default on each stock acquisition interest-free loan would be covered by private sector capital credit risk insurance and reinsurance, but would not require citizens to reduce their funds for consumption to purchase shares. There would be no prerequisite requirement to qualify for an annual set capital credit loan other than American citizenship.
This idea to stimulate environmentally responsible economic growth and provide retirement security for EVERY American is based on the premise that what is needed is for the system to facilitate spreading the ownership of productive capital more broadly as the economy grows with full payout of dividend earnings, without taking anything away from the 1 to 10 percent who now own 50 to 90 percent of the corporate productive capital wealth assets. In doing so, the ownership pie would desirably get much bigger and their percentage of the total ownership would decrease, as ownership gets broader and broader, and as massive accumulations of capital wealth are spread out to the people who helped the wealthy to amass fortunes.
This would benefit the traditionally disenfranchised poor and working and middle class, who are propertyless in terms of owning productive capital assets. It would also result is tremendous economic growth, which would benefit everyone including the already wealthy ownership class, and create opportunities for real jobs, not make-work as an expanded, environmentally responsible economy is built that can support general affluence for EVERY American citizen. Thus, as productive capital income is distributed more broadly and the demand for products and services is distributed more broadly from the earnings of capital, the result would be the sustentation of consumer demand, which will promote economic growth. That also means that over time, EVERY child, woman and man could accumulate a diversified portfolio of wealth-creating, income-producing productive capital assets to provide economic security in retirement and not be dependent on having to work during retirement or rely on government-assisted welfare.
One might ask how we failed to grasp the significance of productive capital’s input and the necessity for broad private sector individual ownership?
Unfortunately, ever since the 1946 passage of the Full Employment Act, economists and politicians formulating national economic policy have beguiled us into believing that economic power is democratically distributed if we have full employment––thus the political focus on job creation and redistribution of wealth rather than on full production and broader productive capital ownership accumulation. This is manifested in the belief that labor work is the ONLY way to participate in production and earn income. Yet, the wealthy ownership class knows that this notion is idiotic.
Unfortunately, ever since the 1946 passage of the Full Employment Act, economists and politicians formulating national economic policy have beguiled us into believing that economic power is democratically distributed if we have full employment––thus the political focus on job creation and redistribution of wealth rather than on full production and broader productive capital ownership accumulation. This is manifested in the belief that labor work is the ONLY way to participate in production and earn income. Yet, the wealthy ownership class knows that this notion is idiotic.
In real productive terms, productivity gains are the result of tectonic shifts in the technologies of production, which consequently eliminates the need for human labor, destroys jobs, and devalues the worth of labor.
One should ask what form would the structural reforms take. Employment in this new enlightened age would start at the time one enters the economic world as a labor worker, to become increasingly a productive capital owner, and at some point to retire as a labor worker and continue to participate in production and to earn income as a productive capital asset owner until the day you die. As a substitute for inheritance and gift taxes, a transfer tax would be imposed on the recipients whose asset holdings exceeded $1 million. This would encourage those owning concentrations of productive capital assets (effectively the 1 to 10 percent) to spread out their monopoly-sized estates to all members of their family, friends, servants and workers who helped create their fortunes, teachers, health workers, police, other public servants, military veterans, artists, the poor and the disabled.
Other stipulations for the structural reform would entail tax policy reform to incentivize corporations to pay out all profits to their owners as taxable personal incomes to avoid paying stiff corporate income taxes and to finance their growth by issuing new full-dividend payout shares for broad-based individualized employee and citizen ownership with full-voting rights.
We need to encourage the insurance industry to expand their product lines to market Capital Credit Insurance to cover the risk of default for banks making loans to Capital Homesteaders under the proposed Capital Homestead Act. Under the provisions of the Act, risk of default on each stock acquisition loan would be covered by private sector capital credit risk insurance and reinsurance issued by a new government agency (ala the Federal Housing Administration concept), but would not require citizens to reduce their funds for consumption to purchase shares.
The end result is that ALL American citizens would become empowered as owners to meet their own consumption needs and government would become more dependent on economically independent citizens, thus reversing our country’s trend where all citizens are becoming more dependent for their economic well-being on the “state,” our only legitimate social monopoly.
Implementing the Capital Homestead Act would significantly empower ALL Americans to accumulate over time a viable, diversified ownership portfolio in our nation’s growth companies and create a truly unique, global-leading just and environmentally responsible Ownership Society that fosters personalism, creativity and innovation. Embarking on a new path to prosperity, opportunity and economic justice will expand growth of our market economy in ways that democratize future ownership opportunities, while building a future economy that can support general affluence for EVERY American.
Support the Agenda of The JUST Third WAY Movement (also known as “Economic Personalism”) at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-basic-principles-of-economic-and-social-justice-by-norman-g-kurland/ and http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-a-new-vision-for-providing-hope-justice-and-economic-empowerment/.
Support Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice.
Support the enactment of the proposed Capital Homestead Act (aka Economic Democracy Act and Economic Empowerment Act) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/. And The Capital Homestead Act brochure, pdf print version at http://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/C-CHAflyer_1018101.pdf and Capital Homestead Accounts (CHAs) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/capital-homestead-accounts-chas/.
