Bill Clinton: “I can't add much to what's been said, except I would like--this is the one and only time I'll try to do this because the…”

“I can't add much to what's been said, except I would like--this is the one and only time I'll try to do this because the Social Security issue itself is sufficiently complex and important--but just for a moment, since you talked about families that are at risk of having something bad happen, I'd like to fold the Social Security issue into the larger issue of family savings, just for a moment, and ask you to think about it and think about it from the point of view of a family living on, let's say, $20,000 a year and one living on $40,000 a year and then one living on $100,000 a year. We want a system, first, in Social Security that has some sort of a disability benefit and a survivor benefit to give a baseline threshold of existence to people that could have horrible misfortune. Then we want a baseline predictable retirement benefit that is universal, again, that--today it's lifting 15 million seniors out of poverty. But there are other things that we want to happen in the course of a family's life. We want more and more people to be able to save for their own retirement. And keep in mind, more and more companies are offering their employees defined contribution plans, not defined benefit plans. There are very few--increasingly, a smaller percentage of our workforce works for a company that can afford to guarantee your retirement, that says, here's what your benefits are going to be forever. So what have we done? We've tried to stabilize any retirement systems that are under water or at risk, with various actions in Washington. And the Congress, in a complete bipartisan fashion, has tried to dramatically increase the ease with which and the incentives through which people have to take out 401(k) plans and then can carry them from job to job. In addition to that, in the IRA proposals that we passed in the last year as a part of the Balanced Budget Act--and then again last year we liberalized them, I think, some--you can now save for an IRA. And you can say, well, you can't afford to save. But if you can, you don't have to pay taxes on that money. And then later, if you withdraw now from an IRA, for example, to pay for your child's education expenses, you don't have to pay taxes on that either. So what we're trying to do slowly but surely is to create a system in which middle class people who are strapped for cash can afford to save in a comprehensive way. Now, what are the problems? Relatively low rate of return on Social Security. And if you move away from low rate of return to higher rate of return, can you continue to maintain the baseline benefit and the universality, number one? Number two, do you create so much risk that, if people happen to retire and need the money when there's a big drop in the stock market, they're in bad shape? Senator Santorum has really thought a lot about how to minimize the downside risk. But I hear your message; I agree with it. And I think those are the real dilemmas we're going to have to figure out: What are people going to have to do for themselves outside the Social Security system, and what can we do to help them do that? How are we going to increase the return; how are we going to minimize the risk; how can we do that and keep the benefit level at an acceptable level? But to me, what I'd like to do when I leave office when the 21st century starts, I'd like to know that any family that's out there with one person or two people that are working their hearts out, doing the best they can, no matter how meager their income, they're going to have a chance to create a little something for their children and themselves later on and have a chance to do even better, and that no 20-year-old person will ever have to worry about whether his or her Social Security taxes are going to be wasted, because there will be a retirement system when they retire. [An audience member suggested removing the cap on the amount of wages subject to Social Security tax, as a means of generating more revenue for the system. A panelist responded that it would not generate enough additional revenue and would increase the tax burden unfairly.]”