Maya MacGuineas: America Needs a Social Security Commission

Maya MacGuineas is president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. She recently wrote an opinion piece for the Dallas Morning News, an excerpt of which is below.

For the past three weeks, The Dallas Morning News has published research and analysis from the organization I lead, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. In this final installment in the series, I’d like to offer some hope. There is a path forward, and it’s one Congress has taken successfully before.

Sadly, despite knowing that Social Security has been dangerously out of balance for decades, Congress hasn’t acted to shore up the program’s finances. On a handful of occasions in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, a few brave policymakers from across the political spectrum tried to come together to put forward a solution. But, for reasons we’ve discussed before, a host of political challenges – myths, lies, and demagoguery – ended these efforts.

These forces don’t seem to be going away any time soon. If anything, the political challenges facing the country are greater now than they have been in decades. In past years, politicians at least paid lip service to values like bipartisanship and compromise. Today, sadly, too many have put partisan priorities over policy solutions.

It wasn’t always this way. In the early 1980s, the Social Security Trustees sounded the alarm, alerting lawmakers and the public that the program was on track to become insolvent as early as 1983. The response was robust and bipartisan. President Ronald Reagan, along with members of Congress from both parties, appointed the National Commission on Social Security Reform, chaired by future Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Read the entire piece here.

Published works by members or staff of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget do not necessarily represent the views of all members or staff of the Committee.