Social Security: The Search for Fairness

The aging of the American population and the piling up of huge federal deficits are putting new pressures on the Social Security system. Caught in the crunch, policy-makers are talking about various reform proposals. These include tinkering with the benefit formulas, shifting a greater portion of the tax burden to the rich and restructuring the system to allow workers to put their Social Security contributions into private retirement accounts. Although the approaches differ, the reform proposals have one thing in common: They are intended to redress perceived inequities in the Social Security system. But they also demonstrate how little confidence exists among policy-makers about the long-term financial and political stability of the program.