MY VIEW: Judd Gregg Congress, Obama Should Tear Up "Rule of Missing Government"
In an op-ed in The Hill, former Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) urged Congress to begin to take action on the budget before the election. He says that rather than trying to fix all of our fiscal problems immediately, they could tackle one aspect while leaving broader solutions until after the election. He explains:
[Congress] should not try and pass a comprehensive bill addressing all the causes of our impending fiscal meltdown.
Such expansive and substantive action is beyond Congress’s capacity, especially with the summer recess looming and the need to campaign this fall.
Similar to TARP, Congress should pick one issue that is a driver of our fiscal problems and can be addressed with a focused, single-purpose bill and fix it.
Social Security comes to mind.
It is a program with dramatic structural problems due to the retirement of the baby boom generation.
It is a critical program. It is broken. And it is fixable.
The president and Congress would not need to do heavy policy work. They could simply adopt the bipartisan proposal of Simpson-Bowles on Social Security, which made it sound for at least 50 years, without significantly affecting present beneficiaries.
Click here to read the full op-ed.
"My Views" are works published by members of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, but they do not necessarily reflect the views of all members of the committee.
Fixing Social Security - Later not Now
I almost can't believe I said that, but I did. While I've been preaching that we need to fix Social Security for years, now isn't the time. Let's see how the elections work out. There are two competing plans for Social Seucirty with one plan being the real solution. But with the current split in party control of the House and Senate it will never pass.
Just remember the lengths the Democrats went to last year to tell us that Congress should keep its "Hands Off Social Security". The rally that Sen. Reid and others held on March 28th, 2011 tells the plan that Democrats have for Social Security. Do you think they will change that position before the elections.
And the real plan would actually do the right thing and privatize it. President Bush tried that years ago, but with the slim majoriteis he had in Congress, it didn't work. Maybe the 2012 elections will bring the size majorities to the Republicans so we can get it done this time.
Either way we are fast speeding towards the point of insolvency, despite what the trust fund projections and Democrats may say. Just look at the 2010 WH OMB Budget. It projected a 10 year Social Security shortfall of $216 billion. Check the 2011 WH OMB and they projected a $554 billion shortfall. The 2012 WH OMB Budget showed a $1 trillion SS deficit (the same year Democrats were telling us it wasn't in the budget and didn't add to the deficit). And in the 2013 WH OMB Budget, the WH OMB projected that Social Security Outlays would exceed Social Security Payroll Tax Receipts by $1.6 trillion.
Janice Eberly (Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Treasury Dept.) wrote me:
"...both Budgets project that annual (Social Security) deficits will grow rapidly as the Social Security beneficiary population swells due to retirement of the baby boomer generation."
So does that mean that the ten year shortfall might be $2 trillion or more in the 2014 budget? If so, we don't have long to really fix the problem. By dividing the shortfall by the actual receipts we find we need to raise taxes by 17% just to get current for 2013-2022. But its probably much more since with a maximum inflation value of 2.1% used in the budget, I'm assuming the WH OMB projections have no Social Security COLA included?
Now's the exact wrong time to try to fix Social Security. Let's wait till 2014 and do it right!
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