Wrestling with Social Security

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A Government commission sizes up a gigantic political problem

Needed: $150 billion to $200 billion over the next seven years. That is the staggering sum that the Social Security system must raise in new revenues, or save out of future benefit payments, if it is to be certain that it can keep checks rolling out to 36 million Americans between 1983 and '89. Or so the eight Republicans and seven Democrats who make up the National Commission on Social Security Reform agreed last week, in a public meeting for once refreshingly free of partisan rancor.

Now comes the tough decision: figuring out some combination of tax boosts and limits on future benefit increases that might actually yield the money. As all politicians (including the four Senators and three Congressmen who serve on the commission) know too well, any effective measures will raise howls of anguish from the young who pay the taxes, the elderly who dread any limit on benefits, or both. As expected, the commission reached no agreement last week. It has until Dec. 31 to submit its recommendations, and then it may file majority and minority reports.

Whatever the commission recommends, the task of getting agreement between President Ronald Reagan and Congress will be made no easier by the passions aroused in the mid-term election campaign, during which many Democrats accused Republicans of plotting to cut present Social Security benefits. The G.O.P. resentment raised by that charge echoed in Reagan's news conference last week. The President complained that elderly people "have been frightened to death" and assured them that "I know of no one, and especially me, who would support" any outright cut in benefits.

Still, the tenor of the commission's discussions indicates that the problem may at last be faced realistically. The reason is obvious: the day when Social Security is expected to run out of money is close enough to force painful choices. The trust fund on which Social Security pension checks are drawn had to borrow $600 million from the separate Medicare and disability funds to write the checks that went out Nov. 3. Robert A. Myers, executive director of the commission, estimates that the fund will have to borrow upwards of $11 billion more to get through the first six months of 1983. Accordingly, Commission Chairman Alan Greenspan had little difficulty winning agreement on the $150 billion to $200 billion figure. That is an estimate of how much the collections of the Social Security payroll tax may fall short in providing for benefit payments, and is based on rather gloomy assumptions about what might happen to inflation and unemployment. Under more optimistic economic suppositions, the seven-year deficit might be as low as $70 billion.

But even the politicians on the commission were unwilling to gamble that an economic boom would save them from difficult decisions. New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat who last year leveled a charge of "political terrorism" against those who said that Social Security was on the brink of bankruptcy, groused that the $150 billion to $200 billion figure was too high, but he went along with it "in the interest of harmony."