AARP holds forum to discuss Social Security reform

AARP held a community dialogue, the seventh in a series across the state, about Social Security Friday morning at Grace United Methodist Church.

Members of the organization are talking to retired people and baby boomers about keeping Social Security benefits 100 percent federally funded and are opposed to diverting any money to private investment accounts.

Social Security will need some revamping, and AARP has proposed ways to improve it, said Norma Collins, AARP Missouri associate state director for advocacy. When private accounts were first proposed, she said, AARP's national legislative committee began to study the possibility.

"The stock market seemed fairly unstoppable," she said, "and it was before Americans started seeing their pension plans wiped out by corporate bankruptcies. Once we did the math, it was clear that it would only worsen Social Security in the long-term financing and replace today's secure benefits with a gamble."

AARP has proposed to Congress that it consider raising the maximum wage cap from $90,000 a year to $140,000, which would lower the 2041 projected shortfall by 43 percent. Also, AARP would like to see the trust fund diversified to include higher-yielding investments than the U.S. Treasury bonds it is limited to, and which would lower the projected shortfall by 15 percent.

Bennie L. Daugherty Jr., AARP Missouri volunteer state president, told the crowd that Social Security has enough money to pay full benefits until the year 2041. Unless funding changes are made, he said, after that year, Social Security would pay only 74 percent of promised benefits.

"Seventy-four percent is just not good enough," Doughty said.

One audience member suggested that Social Security was a "Ponzi scheme" that gambles on there being enough people of one generation to pay the benefits of the next generation. He suggested that the government might as well "gamble on the stock market, bonds and interest."

Collins replied that Social Security always has been a pay-as-you-go system set up so that people paying into the program now are paying for benefits being paid out now, not in the future.

AARP has a toll-free number that will direct a caller straight to the office of his senator or representative so the caller can weigh in with an opinion. Since January, Collins said, more than 500,000 people have called the number, which is (800) 580-5925.