The following editorial appeared in the Portland Oregonian newspaper on March 21, 1998.
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan has nothing up his sleeves, but he may pull a hat trick out of Congress if he succeeds in advancing Social Security legislation this session.
Moynihan has been talking up a plan to restore the system to health by trimming Social Security payroll taxes as well as cost-of-living increases for beneficiaries. His proposal would push private retirement investment, which promises baby boomers more bang for the 2012 buck when the eldest of them start retiring.
While his proposed legislation leaves a lot of room for discussion, he's going in the right direction. And it should open the door for experimentation, something Oregon takes pride in.
Last year, Oregon lawmakers asked Congress to grant waivers to states to let them design and implement alternative retirement plans. That pretty much assumed a system supported completely by private investment.
Moynihan's plan adopts a middle option, allowing workers to direct 15 percent of what currently goes to Social Security into private investment. His bill would also trim 1 percentage point from the annual cost of living adjustments in Social Security, veterans' benefits and Civil Service and military retirement benefits.
That doesn't go far enough for Cascade Policy Institute President Steve Buckstein, chief advocate of an Oregon option. But the real breakthrough is moving the debate into the bipartisan sphere. Where Moynihan may err in clinging too much to the current system, he at least demonstrates a growing awareness of the destructiveness of a system that will tax more and more of a dwindling worker pool to support a burgeoning retirement population.
We've noted before Oregon's effort to pioneer state-by-state experimentation with alternatives to Social Security. What is good about that is the experimentation, not the prospect of having 50 states handling Social security with vastly different systems.
But state experimentation keeps the pressure on Congress to address these questions. That's one of the good things about Moynihan's proposal, too.
Moynihan's plan may not have all the answers. It may not even have all the questions. But it is a starting point.