Congress Sets A Date For A Social Security Debate
Friday, April 29, 2005SUSIE GHARIB: President Bush wrapped up his 60-day Social Security road show today and is now backing a new overhaul plan. For the first time the president has endorsed benefit cuts for upper income workers. House Republicans are moving forward with Social Security reform trying to produce a bill in June but Democrats are digging in for a fight. Darren Gersh reports.
DARREN GERSH, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee has jurisdiction over Federal retirement programs. And by early June, Chairman Bill Thomas says he will write not just a Social Security bill, but a retirement bill, one that delivers a retirement package crafted for an aging population.
REP. WILLIAM THOMAS, CHAIRMAN, WAYS AND MEANS COMMITTEE: Clearly Social Security is the core, but also the whole question of pensions and the changing nature of pensions in today`s society and the question of personal savings.
GERSH: That bill will include a new proposal from the president to guarantee low-wage workers do not retire into poverty.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: And there`s a way to make that happen and that is to have the benefits for low-income workers in a future system grow faster than benefits for those who are better off.
GERSH: Policy analysts call that change in benefits progressive indexing. Under one plan, low-wage workers would see their benefits indexed by wages, while middle class and upper income workers would see their benefits grow with prices. The difference between wages and prices averages about 1 percent a year. Some Republicans say middle and upper income voters would accept that trade-off.
REP. JIM MCCRERY (R) LOUISIANA: What would you chose? 100 percent, I`d rather sacrifice some of my benefit, just don`t raise my taxes.
GERSH: Opponents call progressive indexing a form of means testing that would undermine the very nature of Social Security.
MAYA ROCKEYMOORE, POLICY ANALYST, CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS FOUNDATION: You`re eliminating the benefit for upper income workers to the point to where they eventually won`t even see the need for Social Security, while you`re creating a welfare system for lower income workers that many Americans wouldn`t support to the extent that they view it as a welfare program, and so what it does is it sets the stage for the elimination of the program down the road.
GERSH: The Ways and Means Committee chairman says he also plans to look into the idea of raising the return on the government bond that now sit in the Social Security trust fund, perhaps even making them tradable on the open market. Darren Gersh, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, Washington.
