Social Security Shortfall

It's five days now until America goes to the polls, and still there is a near silence from America's politicians on the looming crisis that will arguably affect the real lives of more Americans than any other: the fully forseeable collapse of Social Security.

The date is now calculated on which Social Security will go insolvent without large, painful changes. Changes that will effect Americans of every age and income. Every year those changes are postponed drives the price to be paid higher--in clipped benefits, in higher payroll taxes, in spillover drag on the economy. Current government accounting for the so-called Social Security surplus, says our guest tonight, makes the Enron debacle look like nothing. And still, we get sound bites.

Up next On Point: the facts behind the silence--the crisis in Social Security.

Guests:

Robert Pozen, visiting professor, Harvard Law School and former vice chairman, Fidelity Investments

Congressman Barney Frank, 4th District of Massachusetts

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly