00:00Social security will start running out earlier than expected. These are according to the latest
00:04projections and some fiscal hawks say that's a good thing because the benefits are too high
00:08and they're not meant to be the sole source of income for a middle class retirement.
00:12Bloomberg Opinion's Catherine Ann Edwards disagrees. She writes, rather than seeing
00:17social security as a reflection of 1935's problems, the goal should be to see the program
00:22as an answer to 2026's problems. Catherine joins us now to discuss. So Catherine,
00:29social security was created in 1935. The country was in a very different place with very different
00:35demographics. There have been changes instituted along the way, but not enough. So is it just
00:40time to make a change to it? Well, it's absolutely time to make a change to it because the trust
00:45fund
00:45will be depleted in the fourth quarter of 2032. What I argue is not to treat this upcoming trust
00:52fund depletion as an accounting exercise. We know how to make a budget balance, at least when it
00:58comes to social security. But that's missing the overall point of the program to have a compact
01:03between citizens and their government to provide economic security at some minimum level going
01:09forward. And in 1935, one of the most pressing issues was the desperate poverty of elderly Americans,
01:14the number who were showing up to work lines because they simply did not have anything else.
01:18Social security solved that problem. It did an outstanding job. But that doesn't mean that the
01:22answer in 2026 is to therefore cut and say mission accomplished. We should think about this very
01:27successful tool that the federal government has and how to deploy it in other cases.
01:32Right. There have been changes along the way. The most major reform coming in 1983.
01:36What was the thinking in 1983 in terms of how to approach social security?
01:40That the trust fund was about to be depleted and they needed to do something in order to balance
01:44the program's finances. Social security really has two eras. In the first half of its 91-year
01:50existence, it was a program that was constantly being changed. It was added to, it was expanded,
01:54who was covered, what situations was covered. It was not at the start of the program in 1935 that
01:59there were benefits for survivors or children, that it covered disability, that it covered all
02:03workers or that the benefits were set in stone. And the first four and a half decades, it was a
02:08lot
02:08of experimentation. What do we want this program to look like? How do we make it work? Once it hit
02:13a
02:13pretty dire fiscal state in the end of 1982 leading into 1983, we passed a massive reform and it's
02:21been basically in a glass box ever since. We haven't touched it in any significant way. That's
02:26the entirety of my lifetime and almost five decades in between reforms. That's a mistake in and of
02:32itself. This is a program that benefits from responding to the needs of Americans. I think
02:37there's some people who would argue that because of the actual dollar amount of the benefits,
02:41maybe they're too high today. I think that that's, you know, relatively inaccurate considering that
02:46the replacement rates of benefits are meant to be even over generations. I mean, the question is,
02:51what are the other problems that Americans are facing? Is there some way that we could continue
02:55to expand this program or think creatively about benefits given today's economy? What's the number
03:01one solution you can come up with at least short term to kind of address this? I don't know if
03:05that's
03:05even possible at this point, but should there be one? Oh, there's no like smoking gun. All we need to
03:11do
03:11is pull out this like secret thing and then social security is fixed for forever. We need to make a
03:15lot of changes to the program, especially on the revenue side. But there's also ways to expand it.
03:21Social security could be the source of a universal paid family and medical leave program so that every
03:25worker in the United States has dignity when for some reason life happens and they can't go to work
03:30for a few months. Social security could be the program that, you know, administers a fully federal
03:34and generous unemployment system, especially in the face of the impending AI job loss that so many
03:40people are worried about. This is a program that functions extremely well, that has very low
03:45administrative costs and extremely high trust from the United States people, something that the rest
03:49of government cannot say at the current moment. So let's use this tool as what I try to advocate.
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