Bradley Elaborates on Social Security, But Still No Plan

December 16, 1999

At a December 12 townhall meeting in New Hampshire, Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley responded to a question on Social Security reform with assurances that recipients will receive their benefits. But Bradley has yet to lay out specifics as to how he will address Social Security's long-term financing problems.

Question: What do you propose to strengthen and guarantee the Social Security benefits?

BRADLEY: All right. Again, I think that you should rest assured that you're going to get Social Security benefits for as long as you're alive. I think that you should know that it's a sacred trust and, you know, right now, Social Security system is solid until 2030, 2035. It will even be higher if we have higher economic growth.

So I think that there are several things to do if we want to extend the solvency of Social Security to 75 years. I think among them the choices are you reduce benefits, increase taxes, you invest the money in higher yielding assets, you allow more immigrants in so more people will be paying, you use a part of the surplus, or you have higher levels of economic growth.

As a president, the one thing that is important to do, I think, is manage the economy so we have higher levels of economic growth so that people who are making $20,000 will be making $30,000, people making $30,000 will be making $40,000 and pay additional Social Security taxes on the additional money that they earn.

But let me be quite frank with you. If we are going to get to 75-year solvency, what's going to have to happen is the same thing that happened in 1983 when Social Security was then truly on the brink of bankruptcy, and what happened was Republicans and Democrats sat around a table realizing what the national emergency was and came up with a solution that extended Social Security until its current date of 2030.

We will have to take Social Security out of being a political football, have reasonable people sit around the table and make an agreement utilizing some of these options that I've laid out for you tonight. There's no doubt in my mind that that could happen, and there's no doubt in my mind that if I were president of the United States, that I'd try to help make that exact thing happen.

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