of benefits where needed the most, and provides an avenue for all work- ers to accumulate financial reserves for retirement.
the option to retire at age 62 with a discounted benefit. The plan also includes relatively modest adjust- ments designed to marginally curtail maximum benefits for high earners, along with several programmatic changes, including improvement in survivor benefits, diversion of retirement account penalties from the Treasury to Social Security, and redesigning the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) currently embedded in Social Security’s rules. Addressing the SSG’s final prime directive, AMAC has also designed a voluntary plan — Social Security Plus — intended to provide additional retirement funds for all workers. With an estimated 50 percent of married couples and 70 percent of unmarried people depending on Social Security for half or more of their total income, an avenue to accumulate additional cash reserves for retirement is critical to their well-being in later years.
• Guarantee achieving solvency and benefit continuity for future generations • Provide a means for all earners to have more income available at retirement through a comple- mentary or supplemental Social Security Plus account. On this first point, the AMAC plan offers two options, one aligning annual cost-of-living adjustments with the federal poverty threshold to ensure that the beneficiaries clos- est to the poverty limits receive the highest adjustment, and the other striking an across-the-board aver- age adjustment to be awarded to all beneficiaries. Either way, the SSG calls for a positive annual adjustment to be mandated. Within the Social Security calcula- tions, the SSG recommends chang- ing the program’s full retirement age from 67 to 70 while retaining
The AMAC Social Security Guarantee
In developing its plan to resolve Social Security’s solvency prob- lem, AMAC continuously examines proposals and options to deal with the long-range problems. As a result, the AMAC Social Security Guarantee (SSG) includes thoughts and concepts introduced in Congress through the years merged with AMAC’s own research and ideas to achieve what we believe is the best path to long- term trust fund solvency without rais- ing taxes. Structurally, the AMAC SSG addresses three prime directives: • Ensure annual benefit increases for those with lower earnings
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Projected Social Security Trust Fund Balance at Year End
$3000
$2500
$2000
$1500
$1000
$500
$0
2000
2005
2035
2010
2015
2020
2025
2030
Year
Volume 17 Issue 1 • 23
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