Social Security is running toward a brick wall, and Congress has apparently decided the best response is to appoint a committee to study the wall. Richard Rubin’s August 30 Wall Street Journal column reports that lawmakers are finally beginning to confront the program’s looming insolvency, with bipartisan proposals emerging for a commission or advisory board that could develop a reform package and expedite it through Congress. That sounds responsible until you ask the obvious question: What exactly do they think the commission is going to discover? The Social Security Trustees have already done the arithmetic. The combined trust funds are projected to run out of reserves in 2034, while the retirement fund itself is projected to be depleted in 2032. At that point, continuing revenue would cover only 83 percent of scheduled benefits for the combined program—and only 78 percent of scheduled retirement benefits. Congress doesn’t need another report telling it that promises exceed the money available to keep them.
There are only three things Congress can do to make Social Security viable for the long term, and realistically, some combination of all three will be necessary.
First, raise the retirement age. Americans are living longer, and a retirement system designed around earlier life expectancies cannot simply pretend that nothing has changed.
Second, determine what level of benefits the country can actually afford, including addressing the way annual increases are calculated. Benefit levels were raised for political reasons over the years to levels far in excess of what people’s contributions should have entitled them to. It is presently politically untenable to actually cut those existing benefit levels. What can be done is to address the way annual increases are calculated. Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment is based on the CPI-W, which is an index that reflects annual increases greater than the rate of inflation. There is no justification for deliberately providing increases greater than inflation at the expense of younger workers who must finance the system.
Third, raise taxes. That means asking workers and employers to contribute more to a system that already consumes an enormous share of federal resources. None of these choices is pleasant. But pretending there is some fourth option called “do nothing” is simply dishonest.
The problem Congress is trying to outsource is the very tough decision of to what extent and in what proportions those three approaches will be used to fix the system. There are no magic tricks here. The basic choices are a higher retirement age, slower growth in benefits, and higher taxes, or some combination of all three. The Journal reports that one bipartisan proposal would create a commission whose recommendations could receive expedited consideration if they produced a plan extending solvency for 75 years. Fine. But who appoints the commission? Who decides what assumptions it uses? Who determines whether retirement age goes from 67 to 68, 70 or something more substantial? How much higher do payroll taxes go? How much do future benefits grow? These aren’t technical footnotes. They are the entire debate. Congress knows perfectly well that every serious solution will require somebody to give something up. Democrats generally don’t want benefit reductions or a higher retirement age; Republicans have historically resisted tax increases but currently lack a unified position. The Journal notes that even the conservative position has fractured, with Republicans having “no unified position” on Social Security. A commission doesn’t solve that political cowardice. It merely gives Congress somebody else to blame when the recommendations arrive.
Congress should stop commissioning studies about problems it already understands and start legislating. Elected representatives—not an unelected panel—should decide when Americans retire, what they can reasonably be expected to receive, and how much they should pay. That’s called governing.