Reply #10: Here's a synopsis of the plan Bush proposed [View All]

[finecraft]

based on a proposal put forth by Robert Pozen.
http://www.cbpp.org/3-21-05socsec.htm

(snip) "Progressive price indexing would represent a profound shift in Social Security. Ultimately, it would lead to most workers receiving the same Social Security benefit level, regardless of how much they had paid in payroll taxes.

If private accounts are added to the equation and are paid for by additional benefit reductions, the results become even more extreme. If progressive price indexing were combined with the President’s private accounts proposal, workers with average incomes of $90,000 or more would eventually receive no Social Security benefits at all. It is unlikely that a Social Security system structured in this manner would remain politically sustainable over time.

Progressive price indexing also would require substantially larger benefit reductions for middle-class workers than several alternative approaches to restoring solvency. This would be the case because with progressive price indexing, the onus of restoring sustainable solvency is placed primarily on benefit cuts, rather than on a more balanced mix of benefit reductions and progressive revenue-raising measures.

Even if one supports making benefit cuts the primary means of restoring solvency, progressive price indexing is not well designed to achieve that goal, since it would produce excessively large benefit reductions if the economy and real wage growth perform better than expected and insufficient savings if the economy performs more poorly than expected." (end snip)

In a nutshell- this is the way bush plans on killing the social security program.