Social Security Needs Reform Now, Simpson Says

It’s time for Congress to make the tough changes needed to save Medicare and Social Security and stop listening to the seniors’ lobby, former Sen. Alan Simpson said Friday.

Simpson, R-Wyoming, was brought to Boise by former Gov. Cecil Andrus, who said the lanky, colorful Wyoming Republican has a message Idahoans need to hear.

“My concern is that I want the people of Idaho to understand that we are facing a problem, and it’s not way off in the future - it’s like three or four years away,” Andrus said. “If we don’t take care of it, we’re in big trouble.”

Andrus and Simpson decried the way the issue was used in the recent election. No one offered solutions, they said.

“When you get into it, you can get politically cremated,” Simpson said during the taping of the “Viewpoint” public affairs program at KTVB-TV. “The AARP will come out of the woodwork - that’s 33 million Americans bound together by a common love of airline discounts.”

Simpson long has been a sharp critic of the powerful American Association of Retired Persons, which he called “a wretched organization” that is “out there telling everyone that all people over age 65 are foraging in alleys for their livelihood.”

Actually, Simpson contends, senior citizens are raking in the benefits of young, working people’s labor at a rate that never can be sustained. Every year, there are fewer people paying into the system compared to the number drawing benefits.the time today’s young people retire, nothing would be left.

Simpson and Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., have proposed sweeping changes in Social Security.

Some of those changes include: raising the retirement age from 65 to 70 over the next 20 years; changing the way the consumer price index is calculated; dropping the accrual rate on retirement by about 40 percent; allowing one-third of the payroll tax for Social Security to go into a privately managed personal retirement account; and cutting back cost-of-living increases for all but the poorest 30 percent of retirees.

“There’s no reason on God’s green earth why someone with a cabin in the Bighorns, a house in Sun City and three cars should be getting a cost-of-living allowance while they’re making 40-grand a year in retirement,” Simpson said.

He added, “It’s absolutely wrong for seniors to suggest that the only way to correct this problem is to raise the payroll tax, because they ain’t paying it.”

But he had strong words also for young people who he said haven’t stood up for their rights.

“First of all, we have to get young people off their cans. We gave ‘em the right to vote at the age of 18, and only 15 percent of ‘em use it … Many of these young people are paying more in payroll tax and Social Security than they’re paying in income tax, and they just sit, numb.”

Medicare also is going broke, Simpson said. “And there’s no way to stop it under present law because of the doctors and the hospitals, and boy they come and hang around your office like a poor relative.”

Rich, elderly people have no need for young, working people to subsidize their medical insurance premiums, he said.

Simpson called the talk this week on how a change in the CPI could cost seniors a few dollars a month in Social Security benefits “a sparrow belch in a typhoon, compared with what’s going to happen in 10 years in this country.”

Simpson retired from the Senate this year after a long career, and soon will begin teaching at Harvard and working through groups like the New York-based Third Millenium to push for reform in the nation’s entitlement programs.

He said reform can happen now, if there’s bipartisan effort.

“What’ll pull it together is that the president doesn’t want to be known as a failed president, and the Republicans in Congress don’t want to be known as people who were just chicken and let a whole system like that collapse.”

“Republicans aren’t about to go through another closing of the government and all that business,” Simpson said. “That was disastrous for us. So you’re going to see practical people deal with it.”

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