Privatizing social security

de Feldstein, Martin S.

Although social security is facing enormous fiscal pressure in the face of an aging population, there has been relatively little published on the fundamentals of essential reform through privatization. Privatizing Social Security fills this void by studying the methods and problems involved in shifting from the current system to one based on mandatory saving in individual accounts. The aging of the population will raise the cost of maintaining the existing pay-as-you-go tax financed system of social security pensions. Government actuaries estimate that the payroll tax rate would have to rise to more than 18 percent to maintain the current relation between benefits and lifetime earnings. To avoid such cost increases, the United States is now considering following the lead of other countries that have shifted from the pay-as-you-go method of financing pensions to systems based on mandatory saving during the working years. This book will be of interest to government policy makers and private pension experts, in addition to economists.