It’s nice to see that at least some folks in authority in Washington are pushing to stabilize Social Security. From the Washington Post:
For much of the past year, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. has been meeting with members of Congress from both parties in hopes of provoking action to put Social Security on secure financial footing. While those discussions have yielded no solutions, Paulson said, they have revealed that members of Congress share the administration’s concern about severity of the problem.[...]
Paulson has been pushing to revive the discussion of Social Security’s future since taking office last year. He said the issue papers that Treasury plans to release over the next three months will build on the shared concern over Social Security’s future by dispassionately laying out the problems and some ways to fix them. Future issue papers will examine some of those remedies, including the effect of indexing benefits by income.
“By focusing on areas of agreement, I hope these issue briefs will narrow the divide and spur further discussion of reforms,” Paulson said in the statement. Paulson believes “the solutions are known,” added Michele Davis, a Treasury spokeswoman. “It’s just a matter of how you put the pieces together,” she said.
Now that’s the right approach to take, I think — remind folks of the problem (in hopefully a non-partisanly-loaded manner), lay out the arsenal of tools to address the problem, and discuss the pros and cons to come up with the “best” (or maybe “least unacceptable” is more realistic) solution.
Considering that grandstanding and campaigning for the 2008 elections has already begun, I doubt that workable reform will emerge until at least 2009. However, it’s good to see that some folks are now quietly laying the groundwork for that to happen.