Bush Forms Commission to 'Save' Social Security
W A S H I N G T O N, May 2 -- President Bush today reached out and touched what has long been known as the "third rail" of American politics, creating a new commission to come up with a plan to reform Social Security.
"We can postpone action no longer," the president said at a Rose Garden ceremony this morning. "We must save Social Security."
Bush made the case, as he did during last year's presidential campaign, that a partial privatization is necessary to strengthen the ailing federal retirement program.
"Social Security reform must offer personal savings accounts to younger workers who want them," he said. "Personal savings accounts will transform Social Security from a government IOU into personal property and real assets."
Bankruptcy Looms as Baby Boomers Retire
The 16-member presidential commission consists of eight Republicans and eight Democrats and is being co-chaired by former Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and Dick Parsons, the co-chief operating officer of AOL/Time Warner and a former Ford administration official.
"It's the most important possibility in social insurance since Franklin D. Roosevelt," said Moynihan.
"I am a baby boomer … and I've been contributing to the Social Security system since 1964," added Parsons. "And until this point it time, I never believed that I was going to get anything out of Social Security when I retire."
The commission is expected to hold both closed meetings and open hearings in the coming months before making its report to the president this fall.
Social Security currently pays benefits to some 39 million retirees. With the nation's 76 million baby boomers heading toward retirement age, the federal government projects that the Social Security Trust Fund will be completely exhausted by the year 2040.
In order to head off that looming bankruptcy, Bush has called for the creation of new accounts that would allow younger workers to invest a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes in the potentially more lucrative stock market.
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