Senator Elizabeth Warren. (photo: Steve Pope/Getty Images)
27 December 13
or
a generation now, working families have been squeezed by stagnant wages
and rising costs for housing, health care, and college. Even as
families have cut back on expenses for things like food, clothing,
furniture, and appliances, it hasn't always been enough; many have been
forced to take on more and more debt just to pay for necessities.
One major consequence of these increasing pressures on
working people is that the dream of a secure retirement is slowly
slipping away. Families haven't been able to save as much as they used
to, and only 18 percent of private-sector workers have defined benefit
pensions today compared with 35 percent two decades ago.
Forty-four
million workers have no workplace retirement savings plan.
With less savings and weaker private retirement
protection, retirees depend more than ever on the safety and reliability
of Social Security. Social Security also protects retirees' spouses and
children, disabled workers, and family members who survive the death of
the family's earner. Whenever I visit senior centers in places like
Malden and Medford, I hear from retirees about how much they rely on
Social Security benefits to make ends meet. Here in Middlesex County
(Mass.) alone, 236,275 people receive Social Security benefits.
Social Security works; no one runs out of benefits and
the guaranteed payments don't rise and fall with the stock market.
Two-thirds of seniors rely on it for the majority of their income in
retirement, and for 14 million seniors, this is the safety net that
keeps them out of poverty. And yet, instead of taking on the retirement
crisis, instead of strengthening Social Security, some in Washington are
actually fighting to cut benefits.
The most recent discussion about cutting benefits has
focused on something called the chained CPI. Supporters of the chained
CPI say that it's a more accurate way of measuring cost of living
increases for seniors. That statement is simply not true. Chained CPI
falls short of the actual increases in costs that seniors face, pure and
simple. Chained CPI is just a fancy way of saying "cut benefits."
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has developed a measure
of the real impact of inflation on seniors, called the CPI-E. If we
adopted CPI-E today, it would generally increase benefits for our
retirees, not cut them.
This is just one example of how the national debate
about Social Security is starting in the wrong place. The fact is that
today, Social Security has a $2.7 trillion surplus. If we do nothing,
Social Security will be safe for the next 20 years and even after that
will continue to pay most benefits through the end of the century. With
some modest adjustments, we can keep the system solvent for many more
years, and could even increase benefits.
The tools to build a future are available to us now.
We don't start the debate by deciding who gets kicked to the curb. We
are Americans. We start the debate by figuring out how to create better
efficiencies, how to make small changes that will make the system
fairer, how to grow the pool of those who contribute, how to rebuild a
system that every single one of us can rely on to make sure that there
is a baseline in retirement that no one falls below.
Social Security isn't the answer to all of our
retirement problems. We need to find ways to tackle the financial
squeeze that is crushing our families. We need to help families start
saving again. We need to make sure that more workers have access to
better pensions. But in the meantime, so long as these problems continue
to exist and so long as we are in the midst of a real and growing
retirement crisis -- a crisis that is shaking the foundations of what
was once a vibrant and secure middle class -- the absolute last thing we
should be doing is talking about cutting back on Social Security. The
absolute last thing we should do in 2013 - at the very moment that
Social Security has become the principal lifeline for millions of our
seniors -- is allow the program to begin to be dismantled inch by inch.
The decisions we make about Social Security benefits
are not just about math. At their core, these decisions are about our
values. I believe we must honor our promises, make good on a system that
millions of people paid into faithfully throughout their working years,
and support the right of every person to retire with dignity and that
means protecting and expanding Social Security.
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