Social Security Issue Off Limits

Oct. 30 -- In the presidential election year of 2000, candidates on both sides of the aisle agreed: Social Security is in trouble. Their solutions, however, were dramatically different.

Barnstorming the campaign trail, then-Gov. George W. Bush uttered the word many Republican congressional candidates now dare not speak: privatization.

At an early stop in Iowa on Jan. 20, 2000, candidate Bush assured the gathered crowd, "What privatization does is allows the individual worker — his or her choice — to set aside money in a managed account with parameters in the marketplace."

His Democratic opponent, Al Gore, preferred a "lockbox," saying repeatedly on the stump as he did on Oct. 14, 2000, in Detroit, "I believe we need to put Social Security and Medicare in a lockbox … insulate them from the rest of the budget, so money can't be taken out of Social Security or Medicare for anything but Social Security and Medicare."

What's changed?

Tumbling markets, the Sept. 11 attacks and the subsequent war in Afghanistan obliterated budget surpluses and severely diminished hopes for a Social Security lockbox. Then a dramatic series of corporate collapses made once noble names like Enron and WorldCom infamous, jolting an already shaky economy and renewing critical refrains that privatizing Social Security might only hasten the program's demise.

What hasn't changed is the uncertain future of Social Security and the politics that surround it.

In their 2000 report, the Social Security Administration's Board of Trustees concluded the Social Security system would begin to run deficits, beginning in 2015. And the reason is simple: the baby boomers are retiring. And as they retire, most experts agree the situation will only get worse as the number of workers per retiree continues to diminish.

More Rhetoric Than Solutions

Yet as campaigns heat up in a feisty midterm election, most candidates seem more interested in rhetoric than solutions.