ABSTRACT
Since Social Security is a program of taxes and transfer payments, a financial rescue necessarily requires increasing taxes, decreasing benefits, or some combination thereof. Although a friend of Social Security, HEW Secretary Califano had the intellectual honesty to observe in his Washington memoir that "It is a misconception to call Social Security benefits an 'earned right.'" On May 9, 1977, Jimmy Carter announced his Social Security proposals, including decoupling the benefit formula so as to stabilize the replacement rate. Like Carter, Ronald Reagan Rout courageously grasped the Social Security nettle. On May 12, 1981, Health and Human Services Secretary Richard Schweiker sent Congress the Reagan administration's proposals for Social Security reform. Social Security is an insurance program establishing a trust fund separate from general revenue, even if several administrations have "robbed" the fund for their adventures. The program's misleading publicity had sown, and the administration had sprouted, many seeds of the paralysis, evasion and deadlock over Social Security.
