On May 10, I was honored to testify in front of the Senate Finance Committee about Social Security finances and their relation to the federal deficit.
Excerpt: If we delay long enough (to fix Social Security), our long-term problem will become a short-term crisis. Moreover, it will be a short-term crisis that utterly dwarfs the one that was solved with considerable difficulty in 1983. The 1983 reforms involved intensely controversial immediate measures. . . If going forward we were to wait as much as twenty years before acting, legislation would need to impose immediate sacrifices upon workers and beneficiaries more than three times as great as in the 1980s -- even in a relative sense – simply to preserve system financing in the short-term. Given the difficulties of enacting even the 1983 reforms, it is highly doubtful that this could be achieved.
Read the full testimony here.
