Description
For legislators, policy makers, and general readers, Graham, an economic policy writer who covered the Social Security reform debate of 2005 for Investor's Business Daily, offers a proposal for Social Security reform that focuses on a safety net that preserves the safety net for both lower earners and the middle class, provides a right of ownership, decreases initial benefits, increases work benefits to help workers close to retirement adapt to less support, and enhances incentives for delayed retirement. He details the limitations of current proposals, and describes how affordability, effectiveness, and fairness are key to reform, while offering a version that incorporates a change in the taxation of employer-provided health insurance and an alternative plan. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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This intriguing book introduces the first Social Security reform proposal tailored to meet the nation's fiscal challenges and care for an aging population.Tackling one of the most difficult and divisive issues facing America today, A Well-Tailored Safety Net: The Only Fair and Sensible Way to Save Social Security seeks to transform the political debate over Social Security reform by introducing the first proposal tailored to meet both the nation's fiscal challenges and the responsibility of caring for an aging population.As the first batch of 77 million baby boomers begins to collect its social security benefits in the midst of the explosion of national debt from economic recovery expenditures, Social Security reform becomes increasingly urgent. Jed Graham takes apart each of the current leading proposals and shows how all of them fall short by the key criteria of affordability, effectiveness, and fairness. Graham proposes a bold new approach that would erase more debt than any other proposal, yet avoid benefit cuts in very old age, when people can least afford them. Short on actuary speak and long on common sense, A Well-Tailored Safety Net makes the Social Security debate accessible to general readers. At the same time, it advances innovative solutions with such command of analytic detail and ideological impartiality as to merit serious study by legislators and policymakers.More than 50 charts and tables detail the debate over Social Security reform, including the cash benefits retirees would get under various proposals
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