Countdown to Reform: The Great Social Security Debate / Edition 1

by Henry Aaron, Robert D. Reischauer

Overview

provides the historical background of the economic circumstances that different generations have faced and shows how changes in Social Security has affected life in America. The authors also analyze the economic assumptions underlying current reform efforts, closely scrutinizing proposals to privatize Social Security by transforming it from an insurance program to a system of individual retirement accounts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780870784309
Publisher:	The Century Foundation
Publication date:	12/28/1998
Edition description:	Older Edition
Pages:	195
Product dimensions:	5.97(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Henry J. Aaron is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the Bruce and Virginia MacLaury Chair. Among his many books are Can We Say No? The Challenge of Rationing Health Care, with William B. Schwartz and Melissa Cox (Brookings, 2006), and Reforming Medicare: Options,Tradeoffs, and Opportunities, written with Jeanne Lambrew (Brookings, 2008). Robert D. Reischauer was a former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

Editorial Reviews

...[A] logical, fair, and persuasive primer....The question of reforming Social Security has become a question of privatizing Social Security....Aaron and Reischauer's main contribution is ...to consider the merits of social insurance and the problem of closing Social Security's deficit as separate questions....[And] they lay out a more than adequate proposal to save it from insolvency. —The Washington Monthly

Jonathan Chait