Bill Clinton: “Let me just make one suggestion here, if I might, for all of you, and I'm embarrassed that I can't remember exactly the…”

“Let me just make one suggestion here, if I might, for all of you, and I'm embarrassed that I can't remember exactly the numbers for the question that the lady just asked. But you need to keep in mind, if the specifics are real important to you--I mean all the specifics--then I think you need to always know what the impact of any specific proposal is. So again I'll say, in the year 2029, we'll stop being in balance, and then we'll go into a deficit of roughly where we can only pay 75 percent of the cost of the existing system of Social Security with the revenues that we have. So if somebody says to you, ``Well, what if we raise the retirement age to 70,'' or ``What if we cut the cost of living by half a percent,'' or ``What if we took the ceiling off the incomes earnings,'' to go back to this gentleman, I think it's important, if you really want to seriously discuss that level of detail, that you know what the impact of each specific one would be. And we can get you that information. For example--or if you want one percent of payroll devoted to individual savings account, what will that add to the gap of 2.23 percent in the short run? And then you just have to decide what you're prepared to do to close the gap. But you have to understand, your Members of Congress here, they're going to have to actually make difficult decisions at something less than an abstract level. They're going to have to sit down and say, ``Okay, if I raise the payroll ceiling this much, it will close four- tenths of a percent of this 2\1/4\ percent payroll gap.'' And one of the things that surprised me--the reason I brought this up--one of the things that surprised me when I started studying it in this way is what a small impact it would have to accelerate the rate at which we're going to 67 for the retirement age. I mean, it does you some good, but it doesn't have anything like the impact that I had imagined it would. Do you want to say anything? [A panelist concurred, emphasizing that a reform package should balance many elements. An audience member then described features of his retirement annuity.]”