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October 18, 2011 at 09:47 AM
Bob Pozen, the chairman emeritus of MFS Investments in Boston, has a long-term plan to cut the enormous U.S. debt, and it involves Social Security, “the only big number that we know how to solve.”
Speaking in Boston on Monday evening at the 4th annual Retirement Income Symposium, Pozen first said that it’s “pathetic on how little we’ve agreed on to deal with our debt.” Charging that “We’ve only agreed on $1 trillion; we should be aiming for $5 trillion,” he then laid out a proposal to “to keep our GDP to debt ratio as it is over the next 10 years.”
He first dismissed the notion that raising taxes is the answer. To get our debt down to 3% of GDP, he said “we’d have to raise the top tax rate to 76.8% and 72.4% for second-tier taxpayers.” While cutting the federal subsidies for ethanol production would, in his estimation, be a good thing, neither doing so, or even eliminating or modifying the mortgage interest rate deduction, for instance, would have a big enough impact.
Not only is the way to “solve” Social Security known, he said, there is also a “bigger chance that we can do so.” He put the unfunded liability of Social Security in the $5 trillion range, but said that changing the initial calculation for benefits from wage indexing to price indexing in a progressive way “would save us $5 trillion.” He pointed out that doing so would not cut benefits for anyone, “we’re just slowing the rise in benefits.”
