Candidates' Social Security Plans Lack Details

Graphic shows Social Security cost of living adjustments for all retired workers from 1999-2009;

(AP)

Barack Obama wants to raise taxes on high-income workers to ease Social Security's looming cash crunch. John McCain favors voluntary private accounts for younger wage earners, saying they can't count on the same government benefits as today's retirees.

Beyond those generalities — and a shared opposition to an increase in the retirement age — the two presidential rivals are long on commitment and short on specifics when it comes to the government's huge retirement income program.

Obama is "committed to ensuring Social Security is solvent and viable for the American people, now and in the future," says his official Web site.

McCain reassured the audience at a recent debate that the program's financial challenges are less severe than those confronting Medicare, the giant health care program for older Americans.

"We know what the problems are, my friends, and we know what the fixes are. We've got to sit down together across the table. It's been done before," he said in support of his push for a bipartisan commission.

Three years after the collapse of President Bush's plan to overhaul the program, Social Security has played only a modest role in a fall campaign dominated by the economy and punctuated by a decline in the retirement savings of millions.

And with both men shying away from specifics, the exchanges are more rhetorical than substantive.

Obama aired a television ad saying McCain campaigned in favor of Bush's failed 2005 proposal, which it characterized as "cutting benefits in half, risking Social Security on the stock market."

In fact, the allegation about cutting benefits was from a study of Bush's plan showing that under one scenario, the benefits of higher-income retirees could be cut in half from what is promised — beginning in 2080 — meaning that most of those affected have not yet been born.

Nor has McCain proposed investing the government's payroll tax receipts in the stock market. But he has previously proposed giving workers the option of diverting some of their Social Security taxes into such private investments.