AND IF YOU COMBINE MEANS TESTING....:

The Means Testing Temptation (Ross Kaminsky, 3.9.11, American Spectator)

America's fiscal need for entitlement reform is pushing the discussion about Social Security inexorably toward "means testing," a policy both the left and the right have long avoided. Both sides realize that means testing, namely reducing or eliminating payments from the program to higher income senior citizens, would recast Social Security from its current perception by citizens as a retirement program to one of outright redistribution or welfare.

Many Americans see Social Security as a savings plan, albeit a coerced one, and a recent poll by the AARP (which certainly knows how to write poll questions geared to suggest as much approval for the program as possible) shows wide support for Social Security with equally wide skepticism about the program's future.

The fact that it's seen as a savings plan, that it has been seen as such for at least a generation despite two Supreme Court rulings that Social Security payroll taxes are not savings, not investment, not insurance, indeed not anything other than another tax levied by government, suggests that means testing in any substantial way will require jumping a substantial political hurdle.

The hurdle has been lowered by the fiscal debacle created under this president and the last one, leaving a substantial subset of both parties ready to attempt to clear it.

...with O'Neill Accounts, HSAs, and personal unemployment insurance and Social Security, pretty much no one will qualify.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 9, 2011 7:09 AM