Mike Pence is trying to revive a George W. Bush–era idea for Social Security reform: letting young workers invest some of their contributions to the program for themselves. That idea was always very controversial. NR was strongly supportive of the idea both as a way of softening the blow of cuts to the program’s future spending and as a way to impose a little added discipline on the non–Social Security portion of the budget. (Letting young workers pre-fund some of their retirement benefits would mean having to make space in the budget for it today, not waiting for later.) I wrote a lot in defense of the idea back in the day.
But circumstances have changed. Personal accounts were premised on a Social Security surplus that existed at the time. We could start a transition to a new system right before the Boomers retired. But that surplus has disappeared, and we have been going through the Boomers’ retirement for more than a decade. Good idea or bad, it’s an outdated one now.