Transcripts For CSPAN2 Social Security Sustainability Part 2 20170814

Security financing and policy options. Thank you for being here with us today. Wanted to start by just getting a show of hands and how many people in this room think they will get at least a penny from Social Security . All right, probably two thirds, three quarters. There is a gallup poll that came out a year or two ago that asked all working age americans that question and 51 of them said they did not think they would see a penny from Social Security. You can interpret that several different ways, but i think its pretty shocking to see how little faith people have when planning for their own retirement, how much they will get. Whether they actually believe that or it was more symbolizing their lack of faith or mistrust in the political system is up for question, but it was pretty shocking that it was that high a figure and i think that really brings us to the discussion we had today in looking at Social Securitys longterm sustainability and the financing structure and how we do make it sustainable for the long run so it will be there in some way shape or form probably with modifications for when you all are in need and ready to claim benefits. So, just want to start briefly by letting everyone know about our commission that we had at the Bipartisan Policy Center call the commissioner Retirement Security and personal savings, cochaired by former senator kent conrad and jim lockhart who is the senior official in both bush administrations and number two at the Social Security administration and they had a group of 19 members who worked for two years stick it was a labor of love. They met about a dozen times fullday meetings dealing with not only Social Security but the private sector and how that contributes, personal savings contributes to peoples personal site retirement. Pretty wide ideological spectrum came to an agreement. I did not think they would get there at the beginning in fact several members that i think we should put Social Security aside because we wont Reach Agreement, but with a stephen kierans help modeling some of the proposals they were considering they did Reach Agreement and i think that shows how difficult this is, i mean, it took them two years and they are not even elected officials. They were able to reach that agreement and i think it shows a model. There are other groups that have done this, but it shows what our policy makers will need to do in the near future to get the system back on track so i encourage you to check it out if you have a chance. It gives you a good overview of the system. You can find it on bipartisan policy. Org, but today we are here with steve and karen and im lucky to be joined by them because they are about people who i have long admired in the Social Security policy space. There are very few people that know more about the program than the two of them. May have been working on it for a number of years and what i love about both of them is that they are actuaries of the mind and so you can ask them a question of what percentage do i need to increase payroll tax bite in order to solve have the Social Security problem and they will give you the answer like that, but if they try really hard they condemn it down enough for the rest of us to actually understand whats going on with this policy issue. You can find their full bios in the packets you have, but steve is the chief actuary and has been for many years at the Social Security and ministration and responsible for scoring proposals members of congress submit and request assistance with seeing what the impact would be on the program as well as contributing to the annual Trustees Report and many other responsibilities that i wont detail here. Karen is deputy chief actuary, so with that i will turn it over to them for a brief presentation on the financing of some of the policy options on the table for fixing Social Security. If you have a question at the end please raise your hand and we will do q a and please make sure you speak loudly so everyone in the room can hear you. Without i think karen will start off. Can i make a one comments on your initial question to the group. I cant resist. Something like 20 years ago or so, which a lot of people in the room when i have familiarity, but there was a survey done up some of us older folks if they were more likely to see Social Security benefits or space aliens in their lifetime and the answer was almost unanimously space aliens, so i was a Point Charlie after that talking to people a bit older than yall as interns that were payroll administrators for various corporations all over the place in a world people pretty much in their 20s, so i raised question to them in all hands went up for space aliens. Then i said so yall make a pretty good income here now and since you know you arent going to get any from Social Security you are probably saving a huge portion of your salary and there was mulling around in the room and a guy stood up in the back and said we didnt really mean nothing from Social Security. [laughter] i think really its kind of the cool thing to say to be cynical and not expect stuff, but when it came down to it they were not walking with they were not voting with their feet. Tells you more about psychology then maybe their actual voice. With that. Karen will take the real story now. Thank you so much and welcome everyone. We are just going to give you a bit of background on Social Securitys financing and some options to change it for the future. To begin Social Security is to legally distinct trust funds. There is the ois fund that its really the retirement and Survivors Fund and then there is the Disability Insurance fund which is for disability benefits. Really, those two are separate legally. Often times we will talk about them on a combined basis, but really they are separate and cant borrow from each other. The Financial Operations are overseen by the board of trustees. There is six trustees, typically and there is the secretary of the treasury who is the manager managing trustee. The secretary of health and human services, secretary of labor, commissioner of Social Security and then there are two Public Trustees dominated by either party. Right now those positions are vacant and they have been for a couple of years, but we are hopeful we will get some folks on board soon. As i mentioned, the two are often looked at on a combined basis and as of the end of last year there were about 2. 85 trillion in those trust funds. Those combined funds run surpluses since the early 80s. They are expected to do so through about 2021. Beginning in 2022, those reserves will start to go down and we expect them to be depleted in 2034, so thats about 17 years from now. When they are depleted, we still expect about 77 of benefits will be able to be paid and thats if nothing else is done, if no legislative changes are made. Still, 77 benefits will be paid. Looking separately, the pi fund is in a bit worse shape and is expected to be depleted in 2028, so attention needs to be paid to that a little bit sooner. This graph here just shows you as a percent of gdp much the trust fund holds in reserves. So, you can see there that back in the 1980s the fund was getting very low. that Time Congress can together and made a compromise and past the 1983 amendment, which brought more revenue into the fund and cut benefits of it, so at that point as it started to go way up until about this is all as a percentage of gdp, but until recently assets were going up and now they are are expected to decline until 2034. So, how does Social Security get its income . I think most of you have seen in your own paychecks employees and employers each pay 6. 2 of their earnings into the trust fund. Selfemployed pays both of those pieces, so the employer and employee peace to make a 12. 4. That is on earnings up to 1,272,000 and often called the taxable maximum, the tax. You will hear various names were, but basically earnings above that level are not asked for Social Security purposes. Another piece of the income is taxes on Social Security benefits. Retirees and disabled folks, beneficiaries with high income pay some taxes on the benefits and that goes into the trust fund as well. Finally, there is interest on those trust Fund Reserves. The trust funds are invested in the interestbearing securities and we get interest from treasury on a regular basis. So, now where does the money go . Mainly benefit payments pick the vast majority are benefit payments. About 61 Million People were getting benefits as of the end of last year. 44 million of those were retired workers and their dependents. 6 million were survivors of deceased workers and about 11 million disabled workers and their dependents. Administrative expenses are another piece, very low. 7 of the expenditures. This is just a little graphical egg to see what i just told you pick the stuff on the top is the income, so youll see payroll taxes for the vast majority of the income. Taxed on benefits are pretty small. Interest is a bit bigger and the bottom of the graph with the benefits going out, the vast majority of the outgo there is a little bit of technical thing, but we have exchange with the Railroad Retirement board to sort of true up our benefits with bears and then there is the administrative expenses. 6 billion sounds like a lot of dollars, but in comparison with the benefits its really pretty small. So, why do we have trust fund that all . The trust funds really provide reserve, so benefits can be paid even when there isnt enough income coming in. A lot of people thick of it as you need at least one years reserve in a trust fund to make it reasonable. Right now, we have about three years of reserves. We expect those to go down and as i said before we expect them to become depleted in about 2034. One important thing to note, the funds cant borrow. They can only spend what has been collected, so when there is not enough money coming into the fund they wont be able to pay full benefits. One thing youll often hear is are the trust funds real or are they just an iou sitting in a filing cabinet somewhere. What does real mean i guess is the question, so if reserve deplete full benefits cant be paid. These funds are real in the sense that they have a consequence. The trust fund really do force congress to act in order to keep benefits going as happened in 1983. Trust funds were about to deplete. They didnt just let them deplete. The real in a sense that commerce had to change things in order to keep the program going. Okay, quickly. I know we want to get to questions eventually. How we typically express the future shortfall, to look at things on a comparable basis we usually look at things as a of the taxable payroll of the program, so this is a good way you can look at something in 1940. You do something now and put it on a comparable basis. So, for example, and 2045 we expect taxable payroll to be about 24. 1 trillion with all the earnings that will be asked by the program. Income to the program is expected to be about 3. 2 trillion, so if you divide us to come income is 13. 24 of the payroll. Similarly, look at the cost of the program which is expected to be about 4 trillion and thats 16. 72 of the payroll, so to get the shortfall in that year you just take the difference between the cost and the income and thats really the gap that needs to be built. This shows the exact same thing graphically. If you focus on the 2045 line that we just talked about you will see that the cost of the program. The dotted blue line at the top is a good bit above the income we expect to be coming into the program, so there is a gap. There is a shortfall at that point and its the job of congress and all of you to figure out the way to fill that gap. Now, steve will go over to the slides and then i will come back and talk about some of the options we have for fixing the program. [applause]. Thank you, karen, thank you shai and thank you all for being here. Remember, an eclipse is not the same thing as space aliens. Just the moon sort of moving on over. I went to add a bit to a caring put forth about the basic nature of the Social Security program and how its financed and talk about the size of the shortfall which we will address later and beyond that even sort of the reason why we are looking at having a shortfall coming. First of all as karen indicated we are looking at this notion of when the reserves depletes and as karen mentioned reserve a depletion is what actually forces congress into action because who if you remember congress was to have a 77 payable, once 23 reduction in monthly benefits from one month to the next. Constituents would not be happy and your chance of getting reelected would probably be effective, so commerce has always stepped up on a timely fashion. You see here a picture of where we are. Karen showed this graph as gross to mastic product and this is the level of reserves we have been building up and are now bringing down as a percentage of the annual cost of the program. This is our trust fund ratio. Historically theres been a contingency reserve about one years worth of of outgo. Why is that . Recessions happen and we discover that recently at the end of 2007, and they can take away some of your reserves. And having a reserve it could allow commerce time to Pay Attention and realize whats going on with the help of our trustee reports and take timely action here you can see the interesting one here is the light blue line with Disability Insurance program. In 1994, the reserve ratio was dropping out p curiels sleep low and we projected in 1995 that it would hit depletion so congress realized in the active. In 1994, they enacted a reallocation of putting tax rate to the di fund. That cause the leading up the di and we knew that would bring them up and in 1995 we projected that it would carry the di fund to reserve depletion, not in 1995, but 2016 and lumbar holdfast fastforward to make 2015 we were still estimating that the reserve depletion would be in 2016. Lucky guess in 1995; right . We projected 2016th and congress acted again with another tax reallocation. Putting some of the revenues directed normally over to di and thats given a further bump. We will get there in a moment and you can see the dashed line. That is where we were projecting that reserve depletion to go in 2023 just a year ago in the last Trustees Report. That was with the help of having a tax rate reallocation, but now we are not talking about 2022. We are tagamet 2028 for disability and why do women extra five years . Keep in mind as karen indicated we are in much better financial shape in terms of reserve depletion with pinkish purplish line then we are for di. Why had things got better on disability . We have this thing called disability incident rate. It is just the number of people becoming disabled, filing for an starting to get Disability Insurance benefits. As a percentage of people out there that are insured, the exposed population number of people that potentially could file for benefits. You can see historically its averaged over 5 or that is yeah, it says five per 5. 4 i believe per thousand well, whatever. Thats about half a percent each year of the exposed population actually becoming disabled and files for benefits. It goes up and down, not real surprisingly. It goes up a bit recession. The last big peak in 2009, 10 and 11. A big recession comes in a lot of people lose work and under normal circumstances and a Strong Economy who could actually qualify for benefits and has significant in terminix nonetheless be able to hold down a job. They will also retain their job and they are still productive, but when recession comes along and they lose their work they will try to find a way to feed themselves and their family. People could possibly file for it and their actual allowance rate goes down a lot in a recession because people file for benefits that are not sufficiently qualified, but a number so we have a boost in the incidence rate. Look at what happened to the solid line going up after the peak in 2010. You can see in the trustee report the 2012, 13, 14, 15 and even 2016 trustee report we are pretty projecting this drop in incident rate after the peak from the recession would come back up to our longterm expected average and it has not been picked disability incident rates have been dropping, dropping, dropping two levels we have not expected and quite frankly are surprised and we are doing work trying to understand why its happening. Is a result of that big drop that we have had this extension use on the prior slide going from the dashed blue line to the solid blue line. For the Broader Program as a whole we tend to look at that on a combined basis most of the time. In part because even though we have separate funds when one of them is in trouble and the other isnt congress will step in as they did in 1994 and mitigating 20 2015 to true up the funds that make them operate on the same path. We will get another combined basis as what we project for the combined Social Security trust fund to deplete our reserves which means at that point they are after we would only under the law be able to pay out as much money as we have continuing to come in. This is our income rates. Looking at that across the whole economy for everyone covered we can see we would drop down to pay only what we can and then at a point of reserve depletion 2034 we would all have 77 cents of continuing tax revenue coming in for every dollar a benefit obligation and that modified the bit over time to make 73 cents by the time we get way out there in 2095, something probably more important for summary all then maybe to me. Why the world is the cost rising so much . You can see the blue line which continues, thats the cost of painful benefits. Over the next 20 years this is rising. Wise a cost writing so much . We try to emphasize this for policymakers on the help understanding why you have a problem, why you have a challenge is important to decide what you want to do about it. The first cut of this is the number of beneficiaries compared to the number of workers is whats important because we are basically a payasyougo system the money coming in from todays workers is what finances the benefits paid to todays beneficiaries so the relationship here, the beneficiaries per 100 workers is important and over the next 20 years that rises a lot. Again, the question of thats why the cost is going up because beneficiaries is rising faster than workers. Why is that . Lets look at the population. Maybe some people too young to heard the old adage about demographics is destiny. If you look at the blackline this gives you another ratio we look at that is a pure Population Based ratio with a number of people 65 and older divided by the number of people working age, rough approximation of the sort of what the benefit group is, the Beneficiary Group compared to the people contributing who are working. You can see that was rising a bit for a long time until about 2008 and all of a sudden we have this big blast, this big level shift in this curb that will happen of the next 20 years and the question is why is that. Look at the blue and purple lines and you can see those continue to go up at a slow rate of those lines are ones we have done a simulation of what if at the end of the baby boom time during which on average women were having 3. 3 kids or a lifetime and since its drop down to two kids what if the number of had stayed at three or 3. 3 and you can fade this age of dependency ratio would not have this big pop up and would have stayed on a gentle increase and we would be talking about shortfalls. A little bit of the rise we have would be just from continued aging. So, we see or hear really this big shift thats occurred in the age distribution of ovulation and its really not so much matter that we are living longer its really a matter of a change in the birth rate and really simple way to think about that is back in the day when there were on average three kids born for every couple, a retired couple would be retired in there be three kids back in the workforce contributing either directly or indirectly, but now, we move into a time where we have two kids on average per couple and this couple in retirement will have two kids back in the workforce supporting. Well, two kids either have to contribute more to support the two elders than three or the elders get less and basically thats the question that faces congress. To bit further looking at the demographic sort of movement, this is a little bit some of the same of the age of dependency ratio telling us more. This tells you the age 25 and older population in our country going back to 1940, first year of any monthly benefits paid out all the way up to 2100 and what share of that Adult Population was in these different age groups max . The reason this is significant is it tells you in the band between 1970 and 1990 and what you will notice is that a share those under 65 that were not older group which is sort of the pinkish purple band, 45 to 64 is working age people, but people who are older working age more likely to be disabled in the twice five to 44 and you can see the share of the toy five to 64 in the older group is shrinking. Between 1990 and 2010 look at the relationship in this graph. The share of the people up to 64 that were about 45 was increasing dramatically and this is basically the reason the cost of Disability Insurance was rising so much during that time relative to our taxable payroll. People got all excited about that. We had a hard time conveying to people what happens beyond when we go to 2010 to 2030 in particular as the baby boomers move out of 45 to 64 age group into the higher age groups they are moving out of the prime disability ages and as a result the cost of Disability Insurance program is no longer a big issue. Its almost sort of like icing on the cake. Something thats very dramatic about how much the cost of Disability Insurance program is dropping even compared to what we expected based on the demographics, so what are the other aspects of aging and the reason i think i got the nod from the folks in our office, when you talk about something its good to have experience in it, so i have more experience than anyone else here in our office on aging, but speaking of aging one of the other things to look at is the other part of aging metric, which is mortality rates, death rates and you can seek death rates have been dropping pretty consistently pick this is the age adjusted death rate for all ages combined and you can see its been dropping and a lot of people up to about 2009 said this will drop fast forever and ever and you can see from 2009 on death rates have too a good degree leveled off. They are not dropping as fast and the colored line you see going down there indicates we have been projecting faster drives that have been occurring. There were a lot of people say we were not projecting enough to climb and death rates and actually we have been projecting too much. Here you see a bit more of what matters most of the costner program which is whats happening for death rates as 65 and older and you can see this has really leveled off since 2009 with little drop in death rates and we continue to project too much. We expect death rates will decline again, but the key is whenever you try to projects have been the future, dont be surprised if things turn out differently. You have to look at a longterm average, not just we should not get all upset and think there will never be a decline in death rates just like in 2009 when we tried to tell people dont so encouraged that we will have a dramatic drop in death rates forever and ever. Benefit levels, to give you a sense of benefit levels you can look at the benefit levels and we put these in terms of benefit replacement rates. This is the ratio of the benefit amount you would start to get and in this case if you receive your benefits at 65 the benefit level you would get as compared to sort of your career average earnings level as we measured essentially, sort of wage index virgin version and see for a low earner about the 25th percentile of earners you would get around half of what you had been earning in Social Security benefits. For a high earner who had been working steady its more like a quarter. Part of the deal here is to say Social Security is one of the three legs of the stool and you should have some personal savings and maybe your employer is doing something, but Social Security gives you this much. If people come on the roles at 62 as you know we have a reduction for starting benefits earlier than the current 66 normal retirement age. You can see 50 for the low earner drops down to 40 , 25 for the high earners drops down to only 20 , so if you start the benefits early you hopefully will have a better augment from the other two legs of the stool. This is the sort of the unpleasant picture of if Congress Congress doesnt act what would have to have it in terms of benefits that would be payable. In this shows 23 to 27 reduction in the level of benefits that would be payable payable. The last thing i will mention before passing it back to karen is how we fix it, bottom line and this is sort of evident on the cost relative to payroll that i have showed you in the gdp karen showed you basically what we have here is in the future you have 4. 6 gdp is the amount of scheduled revenue we have for the current law, but the cost of paying the full schedule benefits is more about 6. 1 percentage gdp after the future after the point of reserve depletion. That means we either have to pull up the revenue by about a third from what is scheduled in current law to pay paul full benefits or pull down the level of the schedule benefits sometimes they its called promised. I dont understand that. Some combination of the two. As karen indicated in the 1983 Amendments Congress gets together and i think they were compromises sometimes used and they do a little of this and a little of that and we sort of split the difference. One other item, not sure if its on your docket, but our 2. 85 trillion and we could invest in something other than treasury securities and get a higher gain. We are not likely to go to this anytime soon, but we will see and from that i think we pass back to karen. [applause]. Im going to skip over most of these because i know we want to get to questions, but the bottom line is how can financing shortfall be covered. You need to lower costs by about 25 , increase revenues by about 33 or a commendation of those approaches. One other thing i think you both will consider when he put together your own packages later today is whether the current to benefits as they are structured now are adequate. Maybe we want to increase them for some targeted populations. You will hear more about all of these in the next session and the upcoming session, so im going to skip through these right now. This afternoon you guys will be coming up with your own solution we will give you the details on all of these policy options and we really look forward to seeing what you guys come up with. Additional resources, great place to go if you want more information about anything we talked about today or anything we work on that actuarys office , www. Ssa. Gov. There is a wealth of information there of changes that have been proposed, analysis of whats going on under current law, lots of data sets for any of you who are data people. Theres a ton to dig into their, so please go there and take a look and you know where to find us if you have any suggestions, so thank you. [applause]. Thank you both. Incredibly insightful as always. The problem with inviting actuaries is that they know too much, so we are short on time for questions, but we invite you to raise your hands and we can bring a microphone over. I will start off with one or two of my own and we have got about 10 minutes or sell. One thing i would encourage everyone to do after your done exploring these discussions todays visit that website and just click through several of the dozens and dozens of options that steve and karen have scored already because it really shows the magnitude of the changes and packages that we talked about earlier so you can see other contract with one another. Its interesting and you can spend a lot of time there. I guess one thing i went to the let me just mention. We just happen to bring along a few copies of the summary of the 150 plus individual provisions, not that we made up, but members of congress and other entities made up. We will have a copy one for each table and k she went to reference that in addition to the material. I guess i went to ask both of you, obviously there are the options frequently discussed that probably everyone is a minor within this room whether its raising retirement age are raising payroll tax. What are more creative ones you all have come across and scored. Obviously i know your positions you dont endorse options, but was it you have found interesting that in dresser and helmets of the program or are now aspects that dont get discussed as much . One of the things that has come up a bit more recently is that we had not seen too much of in the past is whether the program should tax Investment Income and not just earnings. We see that more and more. The aca introduced a tax on Investment Income. Doesnt go to Social Security, but some folks have proposed doing something similar that would go to Social Security. I would add not to encroach too much, but when the things we found that was interesting was in 2010 there was a Simpson Bowles commission for together and we worked with them on developing sort of a variation of normal retirement age increase and most of the time the increase we have current law that rises up for everyone who will get retirement benefits, but they had some members on their commission that said people who are long career, have high stress jobs that may be can be expected to work as long we dont necessarily want to raise retirement age for them so we worked out with them and as you can see the provisions here and on our website for the conference proposal we worked out a variation for people who have long careers at least wait five years with their average career earnings at low levels like less than two in half times the Poverty Level for their average career earnings that they would have no increase in the retirement age and people above that would have some increase in people four times the Poverty Level would have the full increase, so this is a way of modifying the degree to which we would do this. This is in part because research you have all heard about about mortality rates seem to be improving for high income people been low income people. One thing as you will see that in our letter to the cochairs of the commission, but unfortunately you wont see it in their Commission Report because they had not caught the details of this worked out in time for the report. They only worked it out later for us to do our letter to them. You have both been working on Social Security and these policies for many years and obviously we have known this problem was coming for a long time, several decades now with the baby boomers aging into retirement. We knew there would be a shortfall and how do you think the policy debate has changed over the course of the several decades you have seen from maybe when the problem was a generation or more often to now when it sort of staring us more in the face 15 or so years down the road . I guess i would offer one thing, back at the time of the 1983 amendments we has an office as our group were not in position to literally overnight do estimates that the implication of proposals on a yearbyyear basis to see what would happen. At the time that socalled Greenspan Commission coming up with proposals we were not able to instantly tell them the trajectory of the trust funds. Back at the time there was a Conference Committee on the hill with estimates of the time, but they ended up being locked into we suggested making a smoother, but they were not able to do that. Now, we can just with overnight and we have succeeded as of 1995 sort of suggesting that policymakers look to adjust at the 75 year shortfall which will be also coming to something called sustainable solvency which is to make sure the trust Fund Reserves which is a percentage of the cost of our program, know all leave that they above zero for the next 75 years, but they be stable or maybe rising and not dropdown. It was showing the trust fund reserve was dropping dramatically and so we knew we would be depleting, but since 1995 most proposals have paid attention to this end as shai mentioned i think the policy Center Stroke to achieve ended by our estimates sustainable solvency. Thats 1. 8 think we cant emphasize enough is that while the trust fund is scheduled to exhaustion 2028 or 2034 thats not the date by which really action needs to be taken because if we think about it in the sense of making it a Sustainable Program once you reach the point he saw the lines on steves chart in the air taken a nosedive, so to turn those around to right the ship you cant start the day before. You couldnt immediately raise taxes on everyone in the entire country by 4 or whatever, but its much more preferable to spaces out and gradually facings and over time, so let me with that see if there is one or two questions in the audience. Thank you for joining us today. From an actuarial perspective, why is the payroll tax rate fixed at 6. 2 when the whole system has some features that have dynamic adjustments for things such as the cost of living adjustment, the wage index adjustment in the primary insurance amount for an even the ceiling on the covered taxable payroll . Thats a good question. I think generally when Congress Sets level of taxes they like to do it in a way that people are able to plan for it, so they know it will be 6. 2 and everyone knows it will be 6. 2 each year. It wont fluctuate depending on the status of the program. Remember also that peoples earnings level from yeartoyear tend to rise and our taxable maximum this year is automatically indexed to increase for the average wage in the economy Going Forward, so as peoples earnings level rise over time the 6. 2 represents more dollars every year just as new benefit levels represent more dollars, so its kind of in the sink. Are really real issue is the chairman demographics. We have fewer workers relative to beneficiaries which really means that the 6. 2 which looks like it was just find a generation ago. Its not just find Going Forward we need to have either more revenue coming in from the workers with a change in the demographics or to cut back on benefit levels. Any other questions . One quick thing to what shai mentioned about the value of making decisions sure in one thing we often talk about his we know our trustees lay out also is it would be really good not to wait to the last minute as sometimes happens to enact changes for Social Security, but the Real Advantage of it and acting changes even if they dont get implemented until later is that you have more options to consider, you can give more advanced notice to people if you enact changes and also whatever changes you what you can phase them in gradually and the classic example is the 1983 amendments. Increasing the normal retirement age did not have effect on people until 2000, 17 years later and here we are now 17 years away from does reserve depletion, so maybe not a bad time to think seriously about this and enacting changes even if it wont be affected until later. Thats Generational Equity point as well in a sense that the current baby boomer generation is moving through is the reason for the increase in cost on the system and if we wait another 15 or more years to enact any changes the Net Generation that is coming up into the retirement system now wont be major contributors to the solution. Going back to the demographics, the baby boom generation, not because there are a lot of them. Its because they did not have as many kids and this is not to say that having the birth rate dropped from like three plus down to two is a bad thing because there was a time way back when when a guy was talking about over populating the world and we would run out of food. We dont have that challenge anymore. Now, we just have to live with the idea that we have a different agent distribution and we have to meet that challenge. Any final questions . [inaudible question] although incomes grow in there is a time mechanism with respect to that in Social Security, there are a considerable number of income earners in the country that are paying their full 6. 2 or 12. 4 the plane on their Employment Status within days of the fiscal year, so i was wondering if you could discuss solvency sustainability with respect to the limits . One interesting fact is that for a long time now there have been about 6 of earners over the limit. That stayed pretty steady over the last 30 years or so, but in that time the amount of earnings over the limit has decreased i mean increase, im sorry. Increased quite a bit because earnings at those higher levels there have been huge income dispersions with income at the top going way up and not as much as it at the bottom. Whereas in 1983, about 90 of all earnings was a below the limit and now, we are down to about 82, 83. Back in the early 1980s, the last Time Congress specified a dollar level. They did it on the basis of asking the question what kind of level do we have to have to have about 90 of all covered earnings fall below the tax max. The higher earners having better gains than the lower earners has changed the earnings distribution we are down to 82 and half, 83 and that is one of the things you a look at. I think jason will talk about some of this later about whether or not we should raise the limit to something more than we have in current law. Remember its been indexed over all that time by the growth in average wage and there was an expectation we would stay at 90 below the limit. Should we do something about it . We look forward to hearing what you all had to say. Tonight on cspan2 book tv in prime time looks at espionage. Former wall street journal correspondent scott miller talks about plots to assassinate hitler and and world war ii in his book, agent 110. Former cia officer Nicholas Reynolds talks about Ernest Hemingways involvement in spy craft in his book writer, sailor, soldier spy. Jakubowski share stories about his time as a kgb spy in deep undercover and peter eisner on his book macarthurs spies book tv all this week in prime time on cspan2. This week at a pm eastern on cspan, tonight for former National Security advisers who served the last two president s including Stephen Hadley National Security adviser for president george w. Bush. On the little worried. I think we are in a dangerous time with russia. I think vladimir food has decided americans are anti russian and as his investors has all the time there is no constituency for Us Russian Relations in the us and he is basically saying if you think i am an enemy, i will show you what its like to have an enemy in russia. Tuesday the future of the internet. Hears white house interim chief digital officer. We are talking about how certain platform seen to provide people with information that reforms what they already seen it, but its not like facebook said your conservative and i will keep showing you conservative context. They said im going to show you things from the people you know and im going to show you content from the pages you like and when you click on those im going to figure out whose content is seem to like and keep showing you more. Had a facebook not that, we would not be having this conversation because they would not have grown to the scale to which they grew today. Wednesday a form on the changing world of cities. Hears at wargo paez, former mayor of rio de janeiro. I think cities will play a major role in fighting against populace and the way cities can change representative democracies as a Great Machine to change whats going on. Thursday an indepth look at the Opioid Epidemic including Ohio Attorney general who is suing several Drug Companies for their marketing of opioid painkillers. What is different about this drug problem that we have is how pervasive it is. Is everywhere. It is in our smallest communities, cities, its in our most affluent suburbs. Friday, a conversation with Supreme Court Justice Elena kagan c menke said at at the beginning of our conversation we are not a pure democracy, but a conscious to show democracy and that means the judiciary has an Important Role to play in policing the boundaries of all the other branches and that can make the judiciary on unpopular set of people when they say to a governor or president s or congress you cant do that because its just not within your constitutional power. Watch this week at a pm eastern on cspan and cspan. Org and listen using the free cspan radio app. Next Islamic Religious leaders and scholars on the process that occurs in prison. This is part of a daylong forum hosted by the museum institutes religious Freedom Center on combating violent extremism among muslim communities. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. After you have eaten a real good meal its naptime. Im going to i dont take a nap till 3 30 p. M. , so i have some time. Im excited about this afternoon i was excited about this morning and