Mythbuster
By Kim Clark
January 23, 2005
"No creamed spinach," says Nancy Altman, even though it's a specialty at the Caucus Room, a self-consciously bipartisan Washington, D.C., watering hole cofounded by Haley Barbour, now the Republican governor of Mississippi, and Democratic lobbyist Tommy Boggs. Altman, who worked on Alan Greenspan's 1983 Social Security reform commission, taught retirement policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School and has just written The Battle for Social Security, is trying to debunk popular myths about the insurance system. It's not just for toothless old creamed-spinach eaters, for example. Social Security sends out checks to about 3 million kids who are disabled or who have a parent who has retired,become disabled, or died. And Social Security helps middle-aged folks like 55-year-old Altman avoid having to support their retired parents.It's also not just for the poor. As she munched on her caesar salad, Altman recalled the day's headlines about IBM's freezing its pension plan: The more corporations force workers to rely on the ups and downs of the stock market for their retirement income, the more crucial is Social Security's steady income that keeps pace with inflation and can't be outlived.
The system's financial troubles are minor, she argues. Social Security will most likely have a surplus through 2040. And the later deficit could be fixed with some tweaks: slightly increasing taxes on the top 6 percent of earners, allowing part of today's surplus to be invested in top-flight stocks, trimming the annual cost-of-living adjustment, and requiring all government workers to contribute.
"If the Democrats and Republicans wanted to solve the Social Security problem," Altman says, "they could solve it over lunch here."
