Jim Moran's News Commentary

Fourteen years from now, the federal government will be paying out more in Social Security benefits than it receives in contributions to the Social Security trust fund. And the Treasury Department, according to a 2002 study, foresees the gap between promises made and revenues expected to total $44 trillion over the next 75 years.

That's right, our children and grandchildren will have to contend with $44 trillion worth of unmet obligations by the time they are ready to retire. But even before they are ready to retire, they will have to make tough choices just to keep Social Security alive.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan added to the debate of Social Security and its long-term solvency last week when he told the House Budget Committee that in order to bring down the deficit and ensure the system's solvency, benefits might need to be cut.

While Mr. Greenspan was speaking for himself and not the Federal Reserve, his words carried great weight. While the media read Mr. Greenspan as saying that Social Security as we know it won't exist for future generations of Americans, I heard his statement as saying we need to make tough choices now in order to honor our commitment to the millions of Americans who have paid into and rely on Social Security.

If we don't tackle the issue of Social Security reform now, we will be leaving future generations of Americans some very unappealing options to deal with this crisis.

To keep Social Security solvent, our country may have to cut benefits by a quarter or raise taxes by 36 percent by 2050. Twenty years later in 2070, taxes would have to be raised 50 percent and benefits cut by a third. To avoid raising taxes or cutting benefits, all federal discretionary spending will have to be cut by 20 percent to pay the $27 trillion in forecasted Social Security debt. This is indeed a sobering, if not troubling, economic outlook for our country.

While these forecasts from the Social Security Administration are certainly long-term, they illustrate a key point - Social Security as it is now cannot remain solvent. The first wave of the 77 million member baby boom generation will retire in 2008 and they will begin drawing down on a trust fund that has been raided for the last three years by President Bush to pay for his tax cuts.

What was once a $5.6 trillion surplus when President Bush took office in January 2001 is now an estimated $4.4 trillion deficit through 2014, when you account for the interest that has to be paid on the accumulated debt. That's an $11 trillion fiscal reversal. And the deficit would be much worse if not for the government borrowing an average of $200 billion a year from the Social Security and Medicare trust funds to finance its operating deficits.

The President's fiscal policies amount to a perverted case of Robin Hood. Instead of taking from the rich to help the poor, it's the reverse. The working class - who have paid proportionately more into the Social Security system than wealthier Americans because people stop paying into Social Security when their income hits $88,000 - are having their savings taken away from them as the President uses the Social Security trust fund to pay for his tax cuts that largely benefit affluent Americans.

In fact, more than $2.6 trillion has been shifted from the Social Security accounts of the working class to the bank accounts of the wealthy in the forms of annual tax cuts.

As a result of this money shift, the working class American gets an average annual tax cut of $655 instead of about $25,000 a year in Social Security benefits, while the average top five percent of American taxpayers get an annual tax cut of nearly $60,000.

When we look at the deficit and the forecasted shortfalls in the Social Security trust fund, we shouldn't just see a bunch of numbers. Rather, we should see the lost opportunities to invest in vital programs in education, health care, and the environment, and also lost chances to shore up Social Security and ensure that we don't have to make drastic benefits cuts or- in the worst case scenario - see the program become insolvent, letting down millions of Americans who have paid into the system.

In order to keep our commitment to Social Security and ensure that it is there for future generations, we must reverse the fiscal policies of President Bush. It's not the spending side of the federal ledger that has pummeled us into deficit and threatened Social Security. Rather, it's the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans who, unlike most Americans, won't need to rely on a Social Security check to put food on the table and keep the lights on.