Shivers Over Social Security

I grew up with the “bomb.” That was a scary word back in those days, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union took the world to the brink. But there was another word just as scary and even closer to a little boy’s heart. That word was “broke,” as in, “We’re broke.” As in, “We can’t make ends meet.”

“We’re broke.” I still shiver at the sound of it.

And that’s why the latest discussions over Social Security leave me uneasy. The would-be reformers need to talk more about the special kind of dread that comes with being broke in America. They need to convince us that they care more about it.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the co-chairs of President Bush’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security, supposedly had a taste of hard times. He shined shoes for a while in Hell’s Kitchen to help his saloon-keeper mother meet the bills. But does he feel it? Can this former senator, whose own pension plan is secured by Congress, really imagine being 62 or 65 and alone in the world and broke?

That’s when the word “security” in Social Security takes on a different emphasis.

The other co-chair of the reform commission was Richard Parsons, the new chief executive of AOL Time Warner. Parsons is community-minded. But can this man, one of our most formidable business executives, really see across the divide between millionaires and pensioners?

If Moynihan and Parsons cannot, who will?

I have been reading the biographies of the 16 men and women whom the president appointed to try to nudge the nation toward privatization of Social Security. They are people of uncommon achievement--founders and directors and chiefs and professors and fellows and chairs and managers and presidents and vice presidents. They are, to a person, battle-hardened winners in our competitive culture.

In the way that the successful see the world, the president’s commissioners would transform Social Security into another means to divide Americans according to drive, skill or luck. They endorsed the vague idea that Social Security might get some workers closer to wealth by letting them play the stock market. But they didn’t dare to tell us how Social Security could meet the yawning gap in its promise to provide security for those other workers who play the market badly, or hit it during a big slump or who are running out of time to play it at all.

The good news is that the commission’s report started gathering dust the day it was issued in a Capitol preoccupied with war. The bad news: Recession and budgetary red ink make serious reform more difficult for some time to come.

In 2038, there will be nearly 75 million Americans 65 or older. For many millions, Social Security is all that will stand between them and the misery of being broke. Just ask those Enron employees who had it so neatly planned otherwise.

By 2016, just 15 years from now, Social Security will begin paying out more than it brings in. By 2038, the trust fund surplus will be depleted. The taxes paid into Social Security by the American work force will be nearly 30% short of meeting the nation’s commitments to its retirees.

Let’s translate this into everyday numbers. Workers eligible for $1,500 a month in Social Security at 66 could wind up with only $1,050. Instead of $49 a day in retirement, they could get $34.50. If Social Security is most of what you have, that $14.50 a day could mean the difference between getting by and being broke.

For many baby boomers, Social Security is a time bomb that shadows their hopes--their security--just as surely as the Cold War’s A-bomb did when they were young. The first of these boomers will reach Social Security eligibility in 2008. That’s no longer an unimaginably long time off.

Confronted with that, the president’s commissioners frittered away their opportunity and ducked their responsibility. They tried to light the public’s imagination about how some people might get more out of Social Security.

What they owed the country was some straight talk so that millions of Americans could face the future knowing they won’t get less.