Coalition Leader Seeks Social Security Action

In the wake of the White House sex scandal, the executive director of a leading national organization cautioned Tuesday that the impending Social Security crisis should not be forgotten.

“How are we going to have this president now bring us together with this Congress?” Martha Phillips, executive director of the Concord Coalition, asked rhetorically about the effects of what she called the “impeachment cloud” over Washington.

Speaking at the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn.’s Federal Issues Committee meeting, Phillips said she worries that the current political situation will delay action to ensure retirement benefits for future generations.

“There’s a narrow window of opportunity to act” before the 76 million people born between 1946 and 1964, known as baby boomers, start to retire and begin draining the Social Security reserves, Phillips said. According to statistics supplied by the coalition, the Social Security program will start running a deficit in 2013 that will exceed $1 trillion by 2040.

“The coalition brings you fiscal root canals without Novocain,” Phillips told the dozen or so attendees. “We need to act sooner rather than later so the more gradual and less draconian the adjustments [will] need to be.”

Founded in 1992 by the late Democratic Sen. Paul Tsongas and former Republican Sen. Warren Rudman, the nonpartisan, anti-deficit Concord Coalition supports raising the mandatory retirement age and scaling back retirement benefits received by the largest wage earners, Phillips said.

The problem needs immediate action, Phillips and others at the meeting said.

“We feel very strongly that the problem is solvable,” said Alan Ungar, co-chair of the association’s Federal Issues Committee. “What has to continue is to keep raising the consciousness that there is a problem.”