In Defense of Social Security

"They are other and odder and after us."

-- Louise Bogan

ON AUGUST 28, 1997, THE DAY AFTER PRESIDENT CLINTON signed the Welfare "Reform" Act, the Wall Street Journal editorialized that Social Security^* would be next. Realizing that it is not as easy to smash the middle class as it was the poor, those leading the attack on Social Security are masking the struggle. Following the advice of Frank Luntz in his memorandum to the Republican Conference (Jan. 9, 1995), conservatives of both parties have cast the debate in moral terms, that is, in terms of "the American dream" and "our children's future." But let us not forget the real intention of conservatives, candidly expressed by David Stockman, President Reagan's budget director: "There are no entitlements, period."¹ Conservatives of both parties want to dismantle what is left of the welfare state.

Social welfare programs have always had philosophically opposite approaches: that of residualism and that of social insurance. Residualists believe that social welfare should be a safety net with very modest benefits for those who have fallen. They would means test aid applicants, that is, make sure they are truly needy. Food stamps, Medicaid, the former Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) -- now called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families -- are examples of means tested programs. Where residualism is reactive, social insurance is preventive: by universalizing financial security, it prevents collapse of a family's living standards. With contributions during one's working life, Social Security is a nearly universal program, our best example of social insurance.

Why not do away with universality and structure a program to give money only to people who need it? Why not reduce or eliminate S.S. tax contributions? Why give money to rich people who surely don't need it? Well, there are several problems with means testing:

1. It would encourage fraud, since beneficiaries would be tempted to hide or transfer their assets.

2. Related to this, administrative costs would be much higher than the eight tenths of 1% of benefits that Social Security is running now. Compare that to the astoundingly high 34% administrative costs of means tested 1995 welfare (Aid for Families With Dependent Children) benefits!²

3. Once you set the limit at, say, $40,000 and decree that those earning above it are ineligible for some or all of Social Security benefits, that limit can -- and surely will -- be changed to $30,000, then $20,000, etc., until Social Security is destroyed. Remember the words of David Stockman and those of The Wall Street Journal.

4. It would discourage savings since many would want to qualify for the means test, and the nation needs more, not less, savings, a point Robert Ball made in his testimony before the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform (July 15, 1994).

5. Once the middle class and the rich are excluded from Social Security they will no longer support it and it will be doomed.

6. Means testing always involves stigmatization and that alone assures Social Security the same fate as that of A.F.D.C. As Richard Titmuss and Wilbur Cohen both said, programs for poor people end up being poor programs. What has helped make Social Security such an extraordinary success for 60 years is its universality.

Perhaps one reason for the continuing debate between residualists and advocates of social insurance is that Social Security has always lacked the theoretical framework of, say, a social democratic society like Sweden. To be sure, Swedish social insurance has been under attack, but the attack has had to contend with tenets of the entire social democracy.

Social Security's Successes and Problems

FIRST, A BRIEF HISTORICAL NOTE: WITH THE TRANSITION from an agrarian to an industrial society, social insurance became a reality first in Bismarck's Germany and then in several Western European countries. Except for some benefits to Civil War veterans as well as to some ex-slaves under the Freedman's Act (minimal and short-lived) and later some workman's compensation, means tested widows' pensions and means tested old age pensions, the United States did nothing until the Social Security Act of 1935, an act that was not initially supported by labor or by employers. The CIO did not see the point of building up reserves when the needs of the elderly were so pressing. (Labor and business leaders did support Social Security by the time of the 1950 Amendments.) The only pressure from below was from the elderly, organized into a mass movement by Dr. Francis Townsend.

Social Security has been a success. In the 58-year period from 1937 to 1994, Social Security collected about $4.9 trillion and paid out about $4.5 trillion, with administrative costs, as I have said, only 8 tenths of 1% of benefits. In March, 1995, 43 million received benefits, including 3 million children (mostly children of deceased workers) and 5 million disabled. The lifetime value of Social Security and Medicare benefits is close to one-half million dollars for an average couple retiring today (one-half due to Old Age and Survivors' Insurance and one-half due to Medicare). About 92% of those aged 65 and over are receiving benefits with another 3% eligible to do so when they retire. The average pay is $8,400 for a single person and $14,100 for a couple. This is hardly handsome, but without Social Security, one-half of the elderly would have incomes below the government's rock bottom definition of poverty; with Social Security, the poverty rate among the elderly is about the same as it is for the rest of the population. Retirees average 40% of their pre-retirement incomes, with lower income retirees, of course, getting a higher percentage of their former earnings. In 60 years, Social Security has never missed a payroll. And contrary to the shrill tocsins sounded by residualists, Social Security is in good shape, "an island of budgetary surplus in the midst of an ocean of red ink," as some Brookings Institute economists put it.³

Here are the reserves the Social Security Trust Fund has built up:

1983	$12 billion (then the '83 Amendments brought increased revenue)
1989	$163 billion
1990	$226 billion
1994	$436 billion
1995	$483 billion
1996	$550 billion

And here are the reserves estimated for the near future:

2010	over $1 trillion
2018	$2.8 trillion
2020	$3.3 trillion

Not only does the Social Security Trust Fund now have over $500 billion in reserve today, but we should also remember that the Fund, like other Trust Funds, has been raided for well over $300 billion by the federal government, first by President Johnson to help finance the Vietnam War, then by other presidents to finance other misadventures (e.g. Star Wars). We are not in a crisis now, as the residualists claim, but if we were, perhaps it should be thought of as a crisis in war spending rather than in Social Security spending. In the 1996 debate on the proposed Balanced Budget Constitutional Amendment, the Republicans balked when Senator Tom Daschle offered to support it if the Social Security surpluses were kept separate from the budget. No wonder they wanted to keep them as part of the budget. Otherwise they would not be able to disguise war spending and might even have to lower it in response to a public outcry. The relevance of war spending to the debate on Social Security is something Social Security analysts -- both left and right -- seldom even mention.

Despite the spate of alarms, 97% of Americans in 1992 favored maintaining or increasing Social Security benefits.⁴ Nevertheless, many, especially the young, do not believe that the benefits will be there for them. Some Social Security analysts have studied this paradox of strong support for the system but low confidence. When focus groups were convened, they began with the assertions that Social Security benefits would not be there, but, after thoughtful discussion, people became less cynical about the Program and wanted to be reassured that they would. As the pollster Daniel Yankelovich has maintained, polls often capture quick reactions rather than informed judgment.⁵

Of course there has been a well financed attempt to scare people, and alarms always get more attention than sober discussion. And Social Security administrators, with their low administrative costs, spend for public information a tiny fraction of the amount of investment counselors, who must sell their products. Moreover, the news media thrives on "news" about problems; an analysis of print media revealed that "On proposals involving reducing benefits, financial restructuring, and reducing eligibility for benefits, paragraphs supporting such proposals outnumbered those opposing such proposals by about two to one."⁶

ALL THIS IS NOT TO SAY THAT SOCIAL SECURITY IS WITHOUT PROBLEMS. The main one is that by 2011 baby boomers will begin to retire, and this will put a strain on Social Security finances. If nothing is done, income (revenue plus interest on accumulated funds) would exceed expenses only until 2020; by 2030, it would not be possible to pay full benefits. But this is not the catastrophic problem the residualists would like to scare us with. As projected by the 1995 Trustees' Report, the deficit over 75 years of the Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance Program (Social Security excluding Medicare and Medicaid) amounts to 2.17%. (Some analysts peg it at 1.9 % and others at 2.2 %.) At present, employees pay 6.2 % of their income in S.S. taxes, and their employers match it with 6.2%; there is a wage cap of $65,400 so that no one pays S.S. tax on earnings above that amount. (Another 1.45% each is paid into Medicare, for which there is no wage cap.) If worst came to worst -- and, as I shall show, it needn't!-- the rates would increase by 1.1 % each for employee and employer. Hardly catastrophic.

When one compares the percentage of population age 65 and over of the United States with Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the U. K., it will be the smallest in 2000 and even smaller than that, comparatively speaking, in 2020 (16.3% against Japan's 24.2%).⁷

Once Congress passed the '83 Amendments to make Social Security viable, the residualists shifted the debate to one of generation equity, and they have mounted a determined campaign to convince the young that "greedy geezers" are shafting them. This has been a major theme of the Concord Coalition, founded by former senators Warren Rudman and the late Paul Tsongas and led by millionaire investment banker Peter Peterson, Secretary of Commerce under President Nixon. What residualists don't want to talk about is the dependency ratio, which would include more than the ratio of retirees to employees: it would include children. "Although the number of elderly Americans is increasing and will continue to increase, the number of infants and school-age children is decreasing even more rapidly. By 2040, the dependency ratio is expected to be even lower than it was in 1960."⁸ As economist Frank Ackerman has put it, "If we could afford to live through the childhood of the baby-boom generation, we can afford to lie through their retirement."⁹ With this in mind, a rational society in the future might well consider cutting property taxes, since fewer schools will be needed, and increasing aid for the elderly (e. g. Medicaid, Medicare).

Though a large part of the federal budget -- one-third -- Social Security (Old Age Survivors Disability Insurance-OASDI, again not including Medicare or Medicaid), in 1995, was only 4.8% of the Gross Domestic Product. Estimations are that it will rise to 6.75% in 2030. But compared to other developed nations, these rates, real and projected, are not off the wall:

Pensions' Percentage of Gross Domestic Product (1994)

Austria	15.03%
Sweden	11.87%
Japan	4.97%
U.S.	4.8%

Source: New Orientations for Social Policy, Paris,1994

The federal government's war spending (mislabeled "defense"spending) in 1996 was $303.3 billions (265.6 on national "defense" plus 37.7 veterans' outlay).¹⁰ This amounts to 16.9% of the federal budget -- over half of the entire Social Security OASDI -- and 3.6% of the Gross Domestic Product. Just think: war spending alone constitutes 3.6% of the GDP as compared to S.S.'s 4.8%, which includes all the money going to the elderly, the disabled, and survivors (excluding, again, Medicare and Medicaid). That is a startling comparison, again one virtually ignored by Social Security mavins, left and right, as I have already indicated.

I do not wish to end this section without mentioning a problem of the Social Security Program not related to the financial one: since aged survivors of retirees get the full benefit of their deceased spouses as long as they live, widows of poor men receive less money, as survivors, than widows of richer men. Social Security is work-related, and they may have worked harder (for example raising more children or running a household more efficiently with less revenue than richer widows), but their S.S. benefit does not reflect this. The cost of changing this would not be great; the problem is that American society views unpaid housework and childcare as unproductive work.

Solutions

RESIDUALISTS, THEN, ARE USING A MINOR GLITCH IN THE FUTURE FINANCING of Social Security -- 2.2% over 75 years -- as an excuse to try to dismantle it. In addition to the Concord Coalition, there was the Americans for Generational Equity, which folded in the wake of Senator Durenberger's financial scandal; and there is the former inner-city activist Sam Beard's Economic Security 2000; and there are younger groups such as American Association of Boomer, Lead -- or Leave and the Third Millennium. What they all have in common is their desire to ditch Social Security and privatize. While they give all kinds of reasons -- the future "bankruptcy" of S.S.; the freedom of being allowed to invest your money where you want to; etc. -- what they really don't like about S.S. is its redistributive aspect. Pete du Pont was a member of the affirmative team in William Buckley's Firing Line debate "Resolved: Social Security Should Be Privatized," aired recently on PBS. Perhaps he spoke for all of the privateers when he wrote this about the income tax system: "It is a politicized method of unequally extracting income from people who have earned it to people who haven't but who the politicians in Congress think have a superior claim to it."¹¹ (A du Pont heir earned money?) Social Security is a social contract, and today's millionaires are increasingly trying to withdraw from communitas.

While each group has its own version of privatization, let us look at proposals put forward in the 1994-96 Social Security Advisory Council. The 13 panel members were divided into three groups. The largest and the most moderate of the three -- known as M.B. (Maintenance of Benefits) -- was led by Robert M. Ball, former Commissioner of Social Security (1962-73) and comprised six panel members, including three labor union officers, a feminist lawyer, and the president of Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF). This group advocated an increase in income taxes on S.S. benefits, coverage of newly hired state and local government workers, and "consideration" of a plan allowing the Government to begin investing a portion ("up to 40%") of trust fund assets directly in common stocks indexed to the broad market. The second faction, comprising two panel members, supports an I. A. (Individual Accounts) plan, which would include a raise in the employee's S.S. tax of 1.6% added to the 6.2% employee-6.2% employer tax, totaling 14%; this account would be a mandatory savings held by the Government but with investment choices for individuals; it would also entail scaled back S.S. benefits, that, presumably, would be made up by the I. A. investment. The most extreme proposal is the P. S. A. (Personal Security Accounts), proposed by five panel members. This would slash Social Security benefits by about half, providing full-career workers with $410 monthly; workers would direct 5 percentage points of the current payroll tax into a P. S. A., which would be managed privately.

OF COURSE, BEYOND THE DITCHING OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT, the main trouble with privatization schemes, despite all the snake oil promises, is that there will be winners and losers. Many middle class and low income workers have had no experience with investments. High risk outfits are sure to offer the kind of returns with which advertisers of State lotteries and casinos now bombard us. And if the market tanks or goes into a bear market of the kind experienced from 1968 to 1982, what happens to retirees? And what happens to the disabled, who were unable to be "full-career" workers? And what happens to survivors, if their spouses (or parents) should die before building up a P. S. A.? William Buckley would let the churches take care of he poor, as they did or didn't do in the 19th century.

If you listened to the Firing Line debate's affirmative side, you might have been inclined to believe that these men, like cargo cultists, are waiting for a force -- the stock market -- to lift all Americans and transport them to the empyrean of the millionaires' circle. But on reflection you knew that they couldn't have believed this. They are cynical men who know very well that many, perhaps millions, would become serious losers in any privatization scheme. And when you looked at the thuggish behavior of John Goodman, of the National Center for Policy Analysis, you realized he has lost all capacity to care. At one point in the debate, after interrupting, jeering, and hectoring, Goodman asked a member of the team against privatizing (Theodore Marmor of the Yale School of Management), what he would do with the Social Security Trust Fund credit account, which he felt was worthless ("Can you sell it on Wall Street?"); provoked, Marmor cried out, "Stuff it in your mouth ... I'm in a period of my life where I still do not like being bullied." (To be fair, Peter Peterson, a colleague of Goodman on the debate team, behaved nothing like him.)

In addition to the objections to privatization I have raised above, the public should be aware that there is a transition difficulty that would affect present retirees and older workers. To solve this, the P.S.A. approach would raise the payroll tax by 1.52% and have the federal government borrow heavily. "To pay full benefits to present retirees and to those retiring soon would require borrowing about $1 trillion."(my emphasis)¹² Conservatives, as everyone knows, are against high taxes and high deficits (some more against one than the other but all against both). What is interesting here is that, in their eagerness to dismantle Social Security, conservatives are willing to raise taxes and to jack up the deficit with huge borrowing by the federal government. So in order to stop "entitlements" from contributing to the national deficit -- and, recall, S.S. "entitlements" don't, they are in fact surpluses -- conservatives would increase the deficit. This is the topsy-turvy world of Humpty Dumpty.

Currently 85% of Social Security benefits are taxable only for those with incomes above $25,000 if single, $32,000 if married. This threshold is low enough and should not be lowered in any case; if anything, it should be raised. But if the Ball faction proposes raising the percentage of higher income retirees' taxability, say to 100%, that would not be a regressive tax. But it may not be necessary, as I shall show.

While the Ball faction opposed privatization, it did join the other panel members in at least considering investment in the stock market, except that for the Ball group, the Government would do the investing. There are some possible drawbacks.

• As I have said, Social Security operates with administrative costs of less than 1% of benefits paid. With privatization, those costs would rise dramatically. Chile's privatized retirement is much admired by most of those trying to dismantle Social Security, but that plan has administrative costs of at least 15%. Even if administrative costs rise 1% (as many say they will), that is more than a 100% rise. Ball's group would avoid high administrative costs by investing in common stocks indexed to the broad market.

• Everyone in the stock market knows that past performance is no guarantee of future returns. What if we go into a long bear market? The Japanese market, the second largest in the world, is down more than half from its 1988 peak. Certainly there have been winners, but let us not forget Orange County, California, which applied for bankruptcy in December, 1994. (It has since been allowed to exit bankruptcy, due to bonds issued.) And the state of West Virginia lost $280 million due to the mishandling of its investment funds by nine major securities firms (yes, they were "reputable" firms). If these things had happened on a much larger scale to the Social Security Trust Fund...! With investments indexed to the market, that would be unlikely, but it certainly could happen to several individual investors, if the I. A. or the P. S. A. approach is tried.

• There would be a conflict of interest. Suppose the Government wanted to ban a dangerous product. Could it do so knowing it has money invested in it? Could it supply peace forces to a troubled area if it knew the market would be affected?

• Currently the Social Security Fund invests in low yield (but very safe) Government treasury bonds. If it pulled out a considerable amount to invest in the market, the Government would have to raise the price of bonds to attract investors away from the market. No one knows how that would affect the market. In any case it would not affect national savings,¹³ the raising of which is an important goal.

• We are already a nation of gamblers with billions going to casinos and lotteries. Would stock market gambling be salutary?

Of course many private and state and local pension funds are heavily invested in stocks, but the federal government should be wary. I would not invest more than 10% of assets.

After 2003 the retirement age is scheduled to increase gradually to 67 over 22 years. Some would like to hasten this as another factor contributing to the viability of Social Security. The problem is that not all jobs are equally difficult. It might be easy for a college professor to retire at 67 but difficult for a miner or an assembly line worker. Moreover, low income men -- especially blacks -- have a shorter life expectancy. To shrink their few years of retirement even by months would be cruel. Postponing the retirement age is not necessary, as I shall show.

There are many other proposals. Edith Fierst, the feminist lawyer in the Ball group of the Advisory Council, wants to tax medical benefits over $300 or $400. However, this would clearly be regressive. Although all members of the panel gave at least lip service to a commitment to the Cost of Living Adjustment for retirees, some liberals and conservatives both on the panel and like Senator Daniel P. Moynihan off it, are looking with eager anticipation at Michael J. Boskins' probably spurious "correction" of the Consumer Price Index.14 This would get them off the hook with the voters, if they are politicians, and it would hurt retirees. ("What can we do? Our hands are tied by the CPI.") And there are other backhanded ways of hurting retirees, for examples, fiddling with methods of calculating retirement benefits, extending the period which average wages are computed from 35 to 38 years (resulting in an average of 3% reduction of benefits), etc. Alas, these proposals come not from the residualists, who want to junk Social Security, but from those committed to S.S. They are unnecessary and should be opposed but perhaps not as energetically as we oppose residualism.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE? I HAVE FIVE PROPOSALS:

1. Stop the federal Government from raiding the Social Security Fund. (Senator Moynihan thinks it is illegal.) Keep the Fund separate from the federal budget. State and local government keep their pensions separate from their budgets, many by state law.

2. Nearly four million state and local government workers are not now covered by S.S. Bring all newly hired ones into the Social Security system. This alone would account for .22 of the 2.2% needed to bring Social Security's long range revenues and expenses into balance.¹⁵ This has been proposed by both the Ball and the I. A. factions of the Advisory Council.

3. Remove the $65,400 cap on income taxed by Social Security so that the rich would pay S.S. tax on all their income, as they do now for Medicare. At present, those earning less than $65,400 pay 6.2% of their income in S.S. tax (and their employers match this), whereas those earning a little over $400,000 are paying less than 1%. (There are over 800,000 taxpayers reporting income of $200,000 or more.) Removal of the cap would generate more than $80 billion annually.¹⁶ After the Advisory Council's report was published, I wrote to all members of the Ball group and asked them why they failed to advocate his. Neither Ball nor the labor leaders answered, but Edith Fierst wrote that "We are concerned lest the high earners cease to support Social Security."¹⁷ The American Association for Retired People (AARP), the largest organization supposedly for the elderly but very conservative, gave practically the same reply, albeit with considerably more double talk.¹⁸ Since the rich would be offended, hit the poor and the middle class.

4. Let the Government pay back every cent it has "borrowed" from the Social Security Fund. How? In the 1950's the rich paid an income tax of 90-92% on top brackets (amount over $200,000 or $400,000 income depending on the year). Today, thanks to the Kennedy and succeeding administrations, it is 39.6%. Raise it.

5. If #4 is impossible to achieve in the current political climate and if #2 and #3 do not quite cover the expected shortfall, then raise the taxing of S.S. benefits of those retirees with incomes over $25,000 (single) or $32,000 (married) from 85% to 100%.

I realize that proposals #3 and #4 might be very difficult to accept, but what bothers me is that almost none of the well known Social Security defenders are even mentioning them as possibilities. Nobody in the Firing Line debate, for example. Eric Kingson and James Schulz, leading S.S. advocates, suggest that "the maximum tax ceiling could be lifted on the employer's portion of the payroll tax,"¹⁹ but why only the employer's portion? And why not lift the cap completely, just as the Medicare cap has been removed, rather than just raise it? Most disheartening is that the last two proposals -- removal of the cap and payment of the S.S. Fund debt -- are excluded from the parameters of discussion by the media. I had a very difficult time getting the Boston Globe to publish my letter on removal of the cap; previously, they had never mentioned the possibility of doing that or of paying off the federal debt to S.S. And The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and -- yes! -- The Nation have also not allowed those two proposals on the table. Could it be that editors and publishers, let alone advertisers, make more than $65,400 and feel no civic responsibility?

MEDICARE HAS BEEN BEYOND THE SCOPE OF THIS ARTICLE, BUT ITS PROBLEMS are more urgent than those of OASDI: Medicare will be able to pay full benefits for only a few more years unless something is done. Examples: radiologists earn more than $200,000 annually, and surgeons average even more; Richard Gelb, CEO of Bristol-Myers Squibb made $12.8 million in 1992;²⁰ many hospital executives are gouging the system for multi-million dollar wages; etc. This cannot continue. A single payer plan, like Canada's, with salaried doctors and with stricter cost regulation of hospitals, drug companies, etc., seems essential. The Canadian system is available to all citizens; patients choose doctors; doctors decide treatment; fees are set for each service. Canada pays much less for health care than the U. S. per capita, and Canadians live longer.²¹ It was a huge mistake -- even a betrayal -- for supporters of this plan, like Senators Wellstone and Kennedy, to ditch it in favor of the Clinton plan, which offered little and was doomed anyway. Obviously, we need a grass roots campaign for a single payer plan.

We have two struggles to save OASDI without hurting the middle class and the poor: one to prevent S.S. advocates from putting in regressive taxes or scaling down benefits, either openly or deviously; the other to stop the residualists from junking the system outright. With shaky allies and powerful, well financed, aggressive enemies, Social Security faces an uncertain future. But our trump card is that 97% public support. Social Security has been called the third rail of politics; our work to protect it is just beginning.

NOTES

* Throughout this article I use the term "Social Security" to refer to Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance, not including Medicare or Medicaid. return

1. This despite President Reagan s words when he signed the 1983 Amendments into law:

   This bill demonstrates for all time our nation s ironclad commitment to Social Security. . . . It was nearly 50 years ago when, under the leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the American people reached a great turning point, setting up the Social Security System. return

2. The 1997 federal budget lists the following costs for actual 1995 welfare budget (in millions of dollars):

   State welfare administrative costs	1,780
   State child support administrative costs	2,124
   Federal administration	1
   Total adminstrative costs	3,905
   Total A.F.D.C. benefits	11,436

   Hence the percentage of administrative costs of benefits is 34%. return

3. Henry Aaron and Robert Reischauer, "Bite the Deficit, Not Social Security," Washington Post (December 16, 1987). return

4. Fay Lomax Cook and Edith J. Barnett, Support for the American Welfare State: the views of Congress and the Public, (New York: Columbia U. Press) 1992. return

5. Virginia P. Reno and Robert B. Friedland, "Strong Support But Low Confidence," in Social Security in the 21st Century, ed. by Eric R. Kingson and James H. Schulz (N. Y.: Oxford U. Press) 1997, pp.188-193. This is a very comprehensive and mostly lucid book, the best on the market, in my view. return

6. Ibid., p. 191. return

7. Theodore R. Marmor, Fay Lomax Cook, and Stephen Scher, "Social Security Politics and the Conflict Between Generations," in Ibid., p. 201. return

8. Ibid. return

9. Quoted in Robert M. Ball with Thomas N. Bethell, "Bridging the Centuries," in Ibid., p. 278. return

10. Compare the $303.3 billion war spending to $11+ billion AFDC in 1995. Although this comparison is beyond the scope of this article, it is shocking and painful. return

11. Boston Globe, 1-23-96. return

12. Ball with Bethell, op. cit., p. 283. return

13. Barry Bosworth, "What Economic Role for the Trust Funds?" in Ibid., 171. return

14. New York Times, 12-4-96. return

15. Ball with Bethell, op. cit., p.272. return

16. Arnold J. Olenick, C. P. A., Boston Globe, 2-12-97. return

17. Personal communication, 3-17-97. return

18. Personal communication, 2-7-97. return

19. Eric Kingson and James Schulz, "Should Social Security Be Means-Tested?" in Kingson and Schulz, op. cit., p. 59. return

20. Boston Globe, 3-31-93. return

21. Michael Kirkland, Boston Globe, 11-20-93. return

Contents of No. 23