WASHINGTON — President Clinton used his State of the Union speech Tuesday to shine the bright glare of national publicity on Social Security, making it clear he wants a conversation and debate among Americans about the future of the retirement program.
Beyond his high-profile proposal to set aside the emerging federal budget surplus to help pay future Social Security benefits, Clinton and Vice President Al Gore are likely to attend town hall meetings this summer, organized at the prompting of the White House, to get people talking about the program's financial problems.
Clinton has invited the Concord Coalition, which endorses restrictions on Social Security spending, and the American Assn. of Retired Persons, a staunch defender of the current system, to be co-sponsors for the events.
The administration wants a blizzard of publicity throughout the year, leading to a White House conference on Social Security in the winter and culminating in a meeting between Clinton and congressional leaders in January 1999 to craft a bipartisan bill to assure Social Security's solvency.
Clinton's plan to reserve future budgetary surpluses for Social Security is, at best, a stopgap measure. It is essentially a bookkeeping device that would help reduce the overall federal debt by declining to spend the surplus on other federal programs.
But its real purpose is to send a strong message to Congress: Let's fix Social Security first. "The surpluses should not be used for any tax or spending items until the Social Security issue is completed next year," Social Security Commissioner Kenneth S. Apfel said Tuesday.
"This is an attempt to push the country to do something we've never taken on before: major entitlement reform when we weren't facing an immediate crisis," said Gene Sperling, head of the administration's National Economic Council.
The AARP had invited Clinton to participate in one of its periodic events dealing with Social Security. A similar invitation came from the Concord Coalition, a citizens group pressing for such measures as a higher retirement age and reduced Social Security benefits for those with higher incomes.
The White House decided the best way to get a broad-based approach welcoming all points of view would be to have the AARP and the coalition as co-hosts for the series of bipartisan town meetings.
