March 14, 2005
EVERYBODY'S DOIN' IT, DOIN' IT, DOIN' IT....:
In Britain and Chile, lessons for revamping Social Security: As the US weighs partial privatization, other countries with similar systems have lived with the challenges and benefits for decades. (Mark Rice-Oxley and Jennifer Ross, 3/14/05, CS Monitor)
A stretched social welfare budget. A right-of-center government keen to promote individual choice. An aging population. A pension system facing bankruptcy.It sounds like the scenario outlined by President Bush as he urges changes to Social Security.
But it could equally apply to Britain 15 years ago, when the country began offering partially private pension accounts - a policy that was hugely popular at first, but has since proven highly controversial.
Ten years before that, in Chile, things were even more dire. The military government, facing what was by all accounts an unsustainable retirement program and a possible default on its obligation to retirees, replaced the state-run pay-as-you-go system with a three-pillared, largely private one. Twenty-five years later, Chile is looked to as a model of how to retool Social Security.
At least 20 countries have added some kind of private component to their traditional pension systems, with seven more in the process of implementing them. Each offers lessons on how - and how not - to revamp Social Security. With President Bush and his Cabinet in the middle of their "60 stops in 60 days" tour to tout changes to the US retirement system, the Monitor asked its correspondents in London and Santiago to examine two of those lessons.
It's not a question of "if" we do this, but "when." The ideal time would have been when putative Third-Wayer Bill Clinton was in office with a Republican Congress--the tragedy of his presidency is that he wasted the opportunity. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 14, 2005 8:47 AM
The sense, from watching the news to reading blogs is that SS reform is falling apart and Bush isn't going to get anything. OJ may be right - the time to have gotten anything done may have already passed.
Posted by: AWW at March 14, 2005 9:57 AMIt will be debated during the 2008 Presidential campaign. The winner will appoint a 'Blue Ribbon' commission to discuss the 'Social Security Problem' and the result will be some kind of privatization, regardless of who wins.
Posted by: Bart at March 14, 2005 10:47 AMAWW - 'Conventional Wisdom' is a negative indicator.
Posted by: Chris B at March 14, 2005 11:29 AMPolitical expediency and tap-dance campaigning do not equate to putative anything. Sure, Clinton could have pushed for SS reform, but he would have faced the same Democrats and their stone-walling (had he been serious about it).
Remember that most Democrats voted against NAFTA, and after welfare reform, turning to SS private accounts would have just been too much for them. My guess is that Gore would have opposed Clinton (keeping his nose ready for 2000). The bill would have passed with Republican votes (and some Democrats), but Clinton just didn't have the stomach for that battle.
I will always remember the story about his indecision regarding some controversial bill in Arkansas - he dithered and flip-flopped for days, finally made up his mind, and then around midnight, snuck back into the Capitol, slid the paper from under the door, reversed himself, and dropped it back through the transom.
And he wonders why he isn't taken seriously?
Posted by: jim hamlen at March 14, 2005 11:59 AMIrving Berlin's "Everybody's Doin' It Now"--"See that ragtime couple over there...
Oh darn. There's no asterisk.
Posted by: Kevin Bowman at March 14, 2005 12:29 PMKevin:
That's not the version we sang when we were children!
Posted by: Rick T. at March 14, 2005 3:35 PMss reform is the diversion; once the main act is over (and the democrats et als are prone on the floor), gwb will swing back around and pick-up ss
reform as a closing act.