Social Security Reform
Capitol Hill Briefing
January 18, 2002
Social Security and Annuitized Individual Accounts
President Bush's commission on Social Security reform "did not score a touchdown in the sense of producing a work everyone can agree on, but it did advance the ball along the road to reform," Bruce Schobel told a gathering of policy-makers and journalists at an Academy briefing Jan. 18 at the U.S. Capitol.
Schobel, chairman of the Academy's Social Insurance Committee, and Social Security Chief Actuary Steve Goss, a member of the committee and Social Security's chief actuary, were the featured speakers at the briefing. The Academy held the briefing to discuss the Bush commission's recent report and the Social Insurance Committee's most recent issue brief, "Annuitization of Social Security Individual Accounts."
Bruce Schobel (above) and Steve Goss (below) speaking at the Hill briefing on Social Security reform
Goss described the work of the Bush commission in the context of larger efforts to reform the Social Security system. He described the three reform models outlined in the commission's report, noting that all three involve some type of individual account mechanism and that two of them would restore solvency to the Social Security system for an estimated 75 years.
Schobel discussed the need to focus not only on the accumulation of retirement assets in individual accounts, but also on the payout phase. He noted that the Academy was helping to focus debate on that issue through the publication of the committee's new issue brief.
Schobel said there are six major questions concerning the annuitization issue:
- Whether to require the use of annuities
- When to convert account balances to annuities
- What form annuity benefits would take
- Who would provide the annuities
- How to price the annuities fairly
- How to tax the annuity benefits
More than 100 House and Senate staffers and other policy-makers attended the luncheon briefing, which was moderated by Academy Pension Policy Analyst Bridget Flynn. The event was one of an ongoing series of Capitol Hill briefings the Academy holds on key public policy issues.
|
About us
