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In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security, composed of sixteen members from both major political parties. Members were tasked with providing the president with recommendations on how to modernize the Social Security system, restore its fiscal soundness, and develop a workable system of personal retirement accounts as part of a newly structured program. This chapter presents perspectives on Social Security reform, drawn from service on the President's Commission. It begins with a discussion of the use of personal retirement accounts as a method of prefunding the Social Security system. The Commission to Strengthen Social Security developed three reform scenarios that incorporate personal retirement accounts as a central element in a modernized system of old-age security. The chapter focuses on one reform plan in particular — one that promises an enhanced and more reliable safety net while also providing workers the opportunity to invest in personal accounts with diversified investment choice and potentially lower risk. It is argued that reforms of this sort can help put Social Security on a self-financing basis for the first time in over a quarter of a century.

This chapter seeks to illustrate the importance of both structural constraints deriving from the established trajectory of the policy regime itself and the relevance of the partisan character of key actors in understanding the scope for significant leadership. Institutionally embedded paths can be moved endogenously but change is usually subsequent to a pattern of path-erosion and conditional upon high levels of trust in the agents of change. Even when the returns generated by the extant path are impaired, the capacity for transformative leadership is often limited to actors who own the issue at hand. Combining these points, it is argued that presidential scholars can improve their predictive capacity by factoring the properties of the path and issue-ownership by key actors into their analyses: both factors would have generated the very clear prediction that partial privatization of Social Security by the Bush Administration would fail. Conversely, an analysis based on the standard short-term political and institutional variables of unified government, presidential commitment, speed, and focus very early in a new administration mistakenly inspired some confidence that George W. Bush enjoyed a window of opportunity for reform.

Municipal governments in the United States began offering retirement plans for their workers in the mid-nineteenth century, and state governments followed in the early twentieth century. As these plans matured, they confronted economic, social, and political challenges, including the creation of the Social Security system, which subsequently shaped their structure, governance, and generosity. After reviewing this history, the authors employ data from all fifty states to estimate a pension benefit equation for hypothetical workers and explain differences in the generosity of plans across states and types of workers covered. The authors show that population growth, plan funding, union representation, and participation in Social Security influenced the generosity of the plans.

This chapter discusses the impact of IT on the work of the Social Security Administration (SSA), the Bureau of the Census, and the US Postal Service (USPS). All three organizations extensively use information technology, in fact, to such an extent that it would be difficult to imagine how they could function in the future without its use. How each came to such a point reflects various experiences unique to each agency. The rate of adoption and extent of deployment reflects internal operational and managerial issues and as with other federal agencies and departments, digital tools had to be configured in ways specific to their needs.

This chapter focuses on the Social Security Act and the disparate treatment of blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants in the administration of Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Aid to Dependent Children, and Old Age Assistance. Though framed as legislation that would help the “average citizen,” scholars have shown that the Social Security Act in fact excluded the vast majority of blacks from the most generous social insurance programs, relegating them to meager, decentralized, and demeaning means-tested programs. European immigrants, by contrast, benefited from many of the provisions of the Social Security Act, and in at least some respects, they benefited more than even native-born whites. The net result of these policies was that blacks were disproportionately shunted into categorical assistance programs with low benefit levels, European immigrants were disproportionately covered under social insurance regardless of citizenship, and Mexicans were often shut out altogether.

This chapter describes Brazil's social security system and the highly contentious reform process. While much of the rest of the South American region moved toward individual accounts, Brazil engaged in parametric reforms. Recently, the country introduced the fator previdenci ário, a system akin to a notional DC system, whereby contributions and benefits are strictly linked but contributions do not go into individual-funded savings accounts. Although a few political leaders have favoured private accounts, individual accounts never received much political support, and the transition costs are considered potentially prohibitive, reaching as high as 201% of GDP. Structural reform is complicated by the fact that the social security system is codified in the 1988 constitution, which means that any structural reform needs to go through the laborious and politically costly constitutional amendment process. It is argued that administrative and legislative reforms that would make the system more efficient and equitable are possible even when support for constitutional reform is lacking.

This chapter examines how Social Security finance was reconstructed in response to actions by Congress, which abolished the mandate for a large reserve and authorized the use of general revenue to pay for benefits when payroll taxes became insufficient. After describing the earmarked tax system created by Congress in 1935, the chapter considers the debate between 1939 and 1948 about the survival of the Social Security tax system and whether Social Security would be financed through the same monies as all other programs. It also looks at a cadre of policymakers, including Wilbur Mills and Robert Myers, who redesigned the earmarked tax system into the structure that defined the program until 1972. It shows that the earmarked tax system left the imprint of fiscal conservatism on Social Security by imposing certain long-term restrictions on the program.

This chapter provides a broad overview of the social welfare programs authorized by the Social Security Act, both when it was created in 1935 and as they exist in 2009. A timeline shows how the Social Security Act has developed into the form in which we know it today, with twenty-one Titles, or parts, generating more than fifty of the nation's most significant social programs. The chapter distinguishes between the Act's social policy construction and the specific programs created from the policy — a distinction applied to all the Act's specific programs, discussed in subsequent chapters.

This chapter assesses Baby Boom retirement prospects, comparing the outlook for this cohort with experiences of previous generations. The impact of aging is assessed using the Social Security's Model of Income in the Near Term and project retirement incomes for a representative group of individuals born between 1926 and 1965. Results indicate that Baby Boomers can expect to have higher real incomes and lower poverty rates in retirement than current retirees. However, the gains in family income are not equally distributed: for instance, never-married Boomer women will be relatively better off while high school Boomer dropouts will be relatively worse off than current retirees. Boomers' post-retirement incomes are not predicted to rise as much as pre-retirement incomes. Additionally, certain population subgroups will remain economically vulnerable, including divorced women, never-married men, Hispanics, high school dropouts, those with weak labor force attachments, and those with the lowest lifetime earnings.

Chapter 4 begins with a brief discussion on the origins of Flemish nationalism. Then, it analyses the post-war expansion of social policy in Belgium and the meshing of social policy reform and nationalist mobilization in Flanders after 1980. This leads to a discussion of the Flemish push for the federalization of the Belgian social insurance system. Such a discussion addresses the following puzzle: Why has the federal social insurance system not been at least partially decentralized in light of the fact that the Flemish political class overwhelmingly supports it? The answer is that federal social partners and, especially, Francophone parties are in a strong institutional position to successfully oppose decentralization. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the Flemish dependency insurance scheme, which could pave the way for the development of further distinct social policies in Flanders.

The story of the Social Security Act documents the growth and development of America's social welfare commitments within the framework of a monumental social, economic and political document. The 75-year debate over the proper social welfare role of the Federal government enters the 21st century with a well-institutionalized policy certificate, but the incremental tinkering with the Act's social programs over the years has left a bewildering array of policies and programs, many unsuited to today's social welfare needs. Unemployment insurance offers a striking example of the need for renovation. Yet the need for overhaul remains a reluctance that, once opened for debate, some of the social welfare advances assured by the Social Security Act may be lost.

The Social Security Administration's simulation model known as MINT (Modeling Income in the Near Term) is used to examine the projected health and economic status of Baby Boomers and their parents during retirement. Projections indicate that boomers will enjoy higher levels of economic well-being and health than their parents, yet the distribution of income and wealth is more unequal among Boomers. For example, the ratio of income to poverty-level income grows three times faster at the 90th percentile than at the 10th percentile. Health problems are concentrated among persons of lower economic status in both generations, but the degree of concentration does not increase across generations.

State and local pensions have been a cost-effective way to ensure that those retiring from public service will have adequate retirement income after a lifetime of work. Despite their strengths, opposition to public pensions has emerged in recent years. This chapter examines the economics of public pensions and outlines the role of public perceptions, politics, and interest groups in the public pension debate.

Mandatory old-age benefit programs tend to require periodic adjustments as a result of demographic and economic shocks. However, such discretionary adjustments create political risk for workers and beneficiaries, and raises taxpayer risk. An alternative way to handle such shocks is to use rule-based adjustment, which can be adopted in an unfunded system without incurring transition costs and without increasing public debt. This chapter explores an approach to this problem that would endow the Social Security Trust Fund with property rights over the revenue of a (much reduced) residual payroll tax paid by future workers. This revenue would be securitized and the resulting securities priced in financial markets. The new securities created in the process would allow beneficiaries to obtain safe real pensions protected from investment risk.

This chapter discusses three important federal income maintenance programs for older persons: the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) Program, or Social Security; the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Program; and the Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP). For each program, beneficiaries/participants, eligibility criteria, financing mechanisms and issues, and reform proposals or need for improvement, are described and critically evaluated, with special attention to the Program's effect on and implications for people of color, women, and/or low-income older persons.

Title XVI of the Social Security Act, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), evolved as a hybrid form of assistance with a mixed pedigree. Daniel Patrick Moynihan sought to convince President Nixon to make all the assistance programs that existed under the original Social Security Act into a single assistance program administered by the Federal government, similar to the insurance programs. The complexity of blending the original assistance programs — Aid for the Aged (AA, Title I), Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC, Title IV), Aid for the Blind (AB, Title X) and Aid for the Disabled (AD, Title XIV) — into a single federally administered assistance program proved too ambitious. Not only were the programs poorly matched, but also the policy objectives of assistance clashed with President Nixon's efforts to reduce the social welfare responsibility of the Federal government. SSI was finally created when Aid to Families with Dependent Children was left to stand alone as a state administered program.

This chapter discusses Social Security reform in Canada in 1996-7. It argues that the C/QPP reforms of 1997 gave merely tweaks to the system as opposed to massive change, with most of the amendments subtle and not fully understood by the average Canadian citizen. These reforms were made without apparent opposition, which is somewhat surprising given that contribution rates were raised from 6 to 9.9% over a short 6-year period. The failure of the Seniors Benefit in 1996 was political, not actuarial. The government failed to understand how popular the OAS was and how emotional the response would be to proposed reforms given the very small- and long-deferred savings that were projected to result. The Canadian social security system today provides Canadians with a high level of income security while leaving ample room for individual savings and investments. The reforms of 1997 have meant that the CPP now rests on a healthy foundation. The latest CPP actuarial report shows that this system is sustainable for at least the next seventy-five years.