Gingrich Backs Panel to Study Social Security

Stepping up pressure on the White House and Congress to join a national debate on the future of Social Security, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) Monday proposed establishing a commission to devise ways to create the world’s “best and safest retirement system.”

Gingrich’s proposal comes as President Clinton and his aides debate how to keep Social Security solvent when the baby boom generation begins its stampede into retirement.

Gingrich made his comments in a wide-ranging speech to Georgia constituents that provided a preview of the issues--including education reform, anti-drug initiatives and tax cuts--that he wants to push this year in Congress and on the 1998 congressional campaign trail. It also was a glimpse of the possible themes of a Gingrich presidential bid, if he decides to launch one in 2000.

“The time has really come to be talking about a generation of goals,” said Gingrich, who will spend the next two weeks on a 17-state fund-raising tour for House Republican candidates. “What should we do over the next generation?”

Many policymakers have toyed with the idea of establishing a bipartisan commission that would decide how to fix Social Security, the huge federal pension system that is expected to run out of money in 2029 when millions of baby boomers will be drawing benefits. Politicians of both parties have been reluctant to take on the issue, fearing they will pay a heavy political price for tinkering with a popular, broad-based system that is the cornerstone of most Americans’ planning for retirement.

Indeed, Gingrich’s speech was immediately greeted with a partisan barb from Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, Democratic National Committee chairman, who recalled the political firestorm over failed GOP efforts to curb the growth of Medicare spending. “If you liked what the Republican Party did with Medicare, you’ll love what they’ll do with Social Security,” Romer said.

Clinton has made fixing the Social Security system a major goal of his second term, and he is expected to raise the issue in his State of the Union address later this month. But his advisors are divided over what exactly to do about it.

Gingrich, the first congressional leader to make a concrete proposal on how to handle the issue, wants to make Social Security part of a far broader review of policies affecting retirement income.

He called for setting up a National Commission on Retirement that would draw one-third of its members from the baby boom generation, one-third from older Americans and one-third from younger people.

Although the speaker gave few details in his speech, aides said afterward that the commission’s mandate would also address a broad range of issues that affect retirement income, such as the private pension system and taxes on investments and inheritances.

“It’s much broader than just Social Security,” said Gingrich spokesman Andrew Weinstein. “It’s about capital gains, death taxes . . . all of what it means to be secure in retirement in the modern age.”

Gingrich called on Clinton to endorse the idea, with the aim of getting the panel up and running by this summer, then having a “national dialogue” on the subject for the next year or more.

“There’s no crisis, but there’s a long, steady problem,” Gingrich said. “We can avoid generational warfare if we will have a dialogue about creating the best retirement system in the world, and we ought to have the moral courage to start that dialogue now and solve it now proactively before it ever becomes a problem.”

In other areas, Gingrich criticized bilingual education and said that all children should be able to read in English by the end of the fourth grade.

“When we allow children to stay trapped in bilingual programs where they do not learn English, we are destroying their economic future,” he said.

To fight drugs, Gingrich promised legislation this year that would give federal officials new powers to seal off borders and go after drug dealers.

He also criticized the earned income tax credit, which goes to the working poor, saying it has a 21% error rate that costs the government $5.3 billion a year.

Gingrich said that taxpayers’ combined tax burden from federal, state and local levels of government should amount to no more than 25% of their income.

“We need a smarter, not a bigger, government,” he said.