Bill Clinton: “Maybe I should answer this since this is really a question, if we're going to defend this, that a Democrat should…”

“Maybe I should answer this since this is really a question, if we're going to defend this, that a Democrat should answer, if we're going to try to keep this nonpolitical. If you think about it, there may be an argument for raising the income some, because of inflation and because a lot more people have moved into higher income brackets in the last 5 years. But if you think about it--let's suppose you took it off altogether. You say, ``What do I care about some baseball player making $10 million a year,'' right? But if you think about it, what would happen is you would be putting people in a position of paying over the course of their lifetimes 50, 60, 100 times more than they would ever draw out of the Social Security system. And you can say, ``Well, they owe it to society.'' But these people also pay higher income taxes, and the rates are still pretty progressive for people in very high rates. So I think you can make--in fact, if you took it off altogether--the gap that will exist in 2029 is the equivalent of about 2\1/4\ percent of payroll, and that would close, I think, if you took it off altogether, I think about a percent and a half of payroll. But you would really have tremendously changed the whole Social Security system. You would have basically said, ``If you get to where you make $70,000 or more a year, we're going to soak you, and you're never going to get anything out of this compared to what you're putting in.'' Like I said, I wouldn't rule out raising it some, but I think we should be very careful before we get out of the idea that this is something that we do together as a nation and there at least is some correlation between what we put in and what we get out, except we want people on the bottom to get out a whole lot more than they put in so we can give them a decent retirement. It goes back to what our nurse said there. [An audience member asked if Congress would consider such unpopular options as raising the retirement age or changing the cost-of-living adjustment formula. Panelists responded that, in the context of overall reform, those options were important considerations but were not a quick fix to a difficult problem.]”