
Greenspan: Social Security Benefits Need to Be Cut 25% to Be Sustainable - Four_Star
http://thesoundingline.com/greenspan-social-security-benefits-need-to-be-cut-25-to-be-sustainable/
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eesmith
Greenspan has a "long, tortured relationship with Social Security".

"Greenspan famously chaired a bipartisan commission that in 1983 issued
recommendations for strengthening Social Security. Those reforms, which
President Reagan signed into law in April of that year, made a promise to
American workers: your payroll taxes will be increased in order to finance the
build up of trust funds, which will secure Social Security benefits when you
retire in the 21st Century. The Greenspan Commission's plan has worked even
better than imagined, with projections today showing that promised benefits
can be paid in full until 2052, according to the Congressional Budget Office."

"Over the past two decades, Greenspan has repeatedly argued that Reagan's
"ironclad commitment" should be broken. Year after year, he has said that the
benefits promised to future retirees are unaffordable, that the retirement age
should be delayed further, and that other ways of reducing benefits should be
considered. And yet in 2001, Greenspan endorsed the Bush tax cuts, which
mainly benefited the highest income Americans. If made permanent, those tax
cuts would amount to more than three times the size of Social Security's
projected shortfall over the next 75 years, according to the Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities. In Greenspan's view, the Social Security benefits that
his own commission promised to future retirees are not affordable, but tax
cuts for the wealthy are."

Quotes are from
[https://web.archive.org/web/20061008205611/http://www.tcf.or...](https://web.archive.org/web/20061008205611/http://www.tcf.org/list.asp?type=NC&pubid=873)
in 2005.

See also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan#Political_views...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan#Political_views_and_alleged_politicization_of_office)
: "In March 2005, in reaction to Greenspan's support of President Bush's plan
to partially privatize Social Security, then-Democratic Senate Minority Leader
Harry Reid attacked Greenspan as "one of the biggest political hacks we have
in Washington"[5] and criticized him for supporting Bush's 2001 tax cut plan."

