I am 63 years old. I could easily argue for maintaining the status quo in Social Security, protecting benefits for me and my contemporaries without regard to our country's future retirees. But I won't, and that’s why I’m leading the National Center for Policy Analysis’ education effort in Arizona. Over 70 million people not long ago were changing diapers, soon they will be wearing them. Over 70 million people will be going from pushing strollers to pushing walkers. In a few short years 10,000 a day will be going to the Social Security pay-out window rather than the pay-in window, and that will happen every day for the next seventeen years.

With rising age expectancies, and improved health care, Social Security simply cannot sustain itself under the current direct pay-through system. Though that system worked when there were significant numbers of workers for every retired person, the fast upcoming ratio of 2 or 3 workers per retired person destroys its viability. Waiting to consider reforms until the system starts paying out more in benefits than it receives in taxes, as anticipated in 2017, is irresponsible and smacks of selfishness by my generation and the Boomers.

Yet we already have politicians, pundits and special-interest groups calling President Bush’s Social Security reform as “dead on arrival”. Their opposition seems to be as much a personal attack on a president they don’t like as resistance to making politically demanding choices that will keep the system solvent. If they can get the American public to ignore the unfunded liabilities of Titanic proportion, then it will just become the younger generations’ crisis to solve later.

I have long advocated a two-pronged solution to saving Social Security - creating personal retirement accounts for individual workers and progressively indexing benefits based on a mix of price and wage indices, thus slowing the growth of future benefit payments to higher-wage workers. This combination will give workers stronger ownership in determining their retirement benefits while providing certainty in benefit levels for low-income retirees who might otherwise fall below the poverty line. Studies by the Social Security Administration and other analysts indicate that simply adjusting annual benefits based on the price index, which typically rises about 1 percent slower annually than the wage index, would save enough money to ensure the system’s solvency.

As a consultant to other countries that have instituted personal retirement accounts, such as Chile, I have seen them work successfully. Allowing workers to put up to 4 percent of their income in personal accounts and choose how to invest their savings gives them a more dependable retirement income source. It also provides an asset that can be passed on to their heirs. Americans get to choose what they want in almost every facet of their lives, why not their retirement funds? Interestingly, there is no plan presently discussed that will take anything away from anyone if they choose to stay in the system. AARP and those opposing personal savings accounts are not only blowing smoke, but at the same time are denying lower income Americans the opportunity to participate in the wealth creating engine of the U.S. economy and stock market.

There are few ideas in the last fifty years that better represent the meaning of America than “Ownership Society”. More control over one’s own life is axiomatically enhanced with personal savings accounts. Imagine the joy of owning, managing, and then passing on a significant retirement account to your loved ones. The current system allows none of that. When you die your money is gone. It disappears. From your perspective, vaporized. Pardon me!

The next time you are discussing saving Social Security through personal savings accounts, ask your friend what it is they have against choice, ownership, inheritance, liberty, and opportunity?

Tax cuts for wealthy must be rescinded

Rep. J.D. Hayworth recently tried, without much luck, to sell skeptical constituents the notion we should gut Social Security’s insured core retirement income in order to finance uninsured private investment accounts which may or may not be there when we retire.

Hayworth’s “town meetings” and large color brochures, mailed at taxpayer expense, are part of a massive public relations effort to convince us that his Republican Party is henceforth pledged to “keep the promises made” if we just let them take insured security out of Social Security. Of course, for the better part of 60 years, the GOP has repeatedly and unapologetically tried to kill Social Security with the promise to “keep promises made.”

Fresh out of ideas, our congressman implores us to tell him how to get out of the fiscal pickle he, as a member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, has put the country in so we can pay out those future benefits he promised.

Perhaps a brief mention of recent political history would provide context for those readers left scratching their heads over why Hayworth views, with alarm, a Social Security funding concern projected for the year 2018. That crisis would come much later, if at all, if Congress were to eliminate projected mega tax cuts for rich folks who don’t need them and bring the federal budget back into balance. With a balanced budget, they could again build surpluses in the Social Security Trust Fund as President Clinton had started doing.

Instead, President Bush slyly attempts to entice younger workers to forsake insured basic income in old age for an investment scheme which would cost trillions of dollars of debt to implement. Why would Republicans lure future retirees to forsake insured basic income, that history proves many will be forced to count on, for capital gains that can never be counted on? Would they similarly advise today’s wealthy retirees to dump secure, income-producing low-interest annuities from carefully “balanced” portfolios in favor of speculative stocks?

Speaking of the lure of compound interest, why isn’t the surplus portion of the Social Security Trust fund professionally managed for growth and invested in the securities markets like any defined benefit pension plan? Public employee pensions, for example, are managed this way. Or would that deprive Washington’s piggy bank? Are the swelling Wall Street commissions on individual accounts and the swelling Republican voter registrations by premature stock investors that important?

Who’s to blame in the next downturn when hoards of penniless elderly, taken for an inevitable speculative ride on Wall Street, start clouding the landscape of the brave new “Ownership Society?” Maybe Herbert Hoover?

And what about other family values? Should a sacred, 70-year intergenerational compact between grown offspring and their elderly retired parents be cast aside so greedy, ideologically challenged yuppies can risk a buck in the stock market, and eventually be free of the “burden” of a modicum of secure income for anyone in old age?

Is anything noble or even fiscally sound in this policy? Or is it just more of the time honored GOP shell game to worm out of paying for the free and prosperous society we – all of us – have created?

Want to save Social Security and restore fiscal sanity to our government, J.D.? Cancel the tax cuts for super rich folks who don’t need them. Stop invading countries who don’t threaten us. Shut out the special interest groups who do threaten us by buying our politicians and ignore the ideologues, special pleaders and character assassins they hire to manipulate rather than inform us.

That might be a good start.