Whatever happened to Social Security?
As the Democrats prepare to convene this week in Denver, and the Republicans gear up for their get-together in St. Paul, Minn., starting Sept. 1, precious little has been said about an issue that touches virtually every American family and, for a brief spell a few years ago, dominated the political agenda.
West Los Angeles resident Marilyn Taylor, 78, is typical of many seniors in relying on Social Security for a significant portion of her income. She told me she received about $1,100 a month from Uncle Sam, which covered about a third of her expenses.
These days, Taylor wonders whether she'll keep receiving her full Social Security payments. And she wonders why neither Barack Obama nor John McCain is focusing on how to shore up a program that's projected to start paying out more than it takes in by 2017 and deplete its trust fund by 2041.
"I don't think either one of them is paying as much attention to this as it deserves," Taylor said.
And it deserves plenty, especially in light of the fact that the first wave of 78 million baby boomers will start retiring next year, placing unprecedented strain on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
John Rother, executive vice president for policy and strategy at AARP, said he's sympathetic to Obama's and McCain's desire to steer clear of controversial topics before the election. "It's unrealistic to expect a presidential candidate to lay out the sacrifices -- and they will be sacrifices -- needed to rescue Social Security," he said.
At the same time, Rother acknowledged that the longer our political leaders dither in coming up with a workable solution to the program's funding woes, "the harder this will be to fix."
President Bush took a shot at Social Security reform in 2005, laying out a plan to shift at least a portion of the program's funds to private investment accounts. If nothing else, the proposal got people to talk about Social Security after years of looking the other way.
It ended up as political roadkill, though, once people realized that diverting payroll taxes to private accounts would make the shortfall worse, requiring the government to go deeper into debt.
Also, a lot of folks simply didn't like the idea of reinventing one of the most popular government programs in U.S. history, not to mention investing their retirement savings in the stock market.
