Kenneth Apfel crusades for
Social Security
As Social Security comes to the forefront of the national agenda, former Commissioner of Social Security Kenneth Apfel is a leading voice in an increasingly heated debate surrounding the Bush administration’s proposals to privatize the system.
Apfel, who ran the Social Security Commission under President Bill Clinton and is now a professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, is one of the foremost experts on the complexities of the Social Security system. In recent weeks, he has testified before the U.S. Congress, appeared on numerous national television news programs, authored two op-eds, and been quoted in dozens of newspapers.
In Apfel’s opinion, Social Security faces long-term challenges but is not in crisis. He disagrees with the Bush administration’s proposals to shift the benefit structure toward individual investment in the stock market, which he says would jeopardize the program’s stability.
Apfel took center stage at a January 26 press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., which marked the release of a new study by the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI). Apfel cochaired the nonpartisan expert panel that produced the 224-page report, titled “Uncharted Waters: Paying Benefits from Individual Accounts in Federal Retirement Policy.” The report urges lawmakers to pay close attention to design issues that need to be addressed if individual accounts are created, and identifies key questions about how payouts to beneficiaries would be handled in the event of retirement, divorce, disability and death.
Two days later, Apfel testified before the U.S. Congress at a hearing held by members of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. He argued that Social Security is not undergoing a crisis, that privatization will not help solve the long-term Social Security shortfall, and that efforts to drastically alter the program’s benefit structure are not in the interests of the young or the old.
“Taking payroll tax revenues out of Social Security to create individual savings accounts makes the long-term problem bigger, not smaller,” he testified. “Unless benefits are drastically curtailed or other revenues raised, privatization only makes the financing problem worse.”
Apfel has been quoted in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today and The Washington Post among many other newspapers. He also has published two op-eds; including one called “On Social Security, let’s cool the talk of a ‘crisis,’” which appeared in The Austin American-Statesman on January 2; and another called “Unnecessary and unwise,” which appeared in The Baltimore Sun on February 7. He has also appeared on several nationally syndicated news programs such as CNN Money, CNBC, CSPAN and PBS’s “News Hour with Jim Lehrer.”
At the LBJ School, Apfel is teaching a course this spring on pension and health policy issues for the aging. He is also coordinating, through the LBJ School’s Center for Health and Social Policy (CHASP) and Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, a symposium called “Big Choices: The Future of Social Security,” to be held April 21-22 at the LBJ Library.
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15 February 2005
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