The White House Conference on Social Security

[Press briefing by Gene Sperling, National Economic Advisor to Presidente Clinton,The White House, December 2, 1998]

MR. TOIV: Good afternoon. As you know, next week, December 8th and 9th, we're going to hold the White House Conference on Social Security. And, as you know, the President's staff has been working hard on this, led by Gene Sperling, who is the President's National Economic Advisor. Gene is here today to brief on the conference.

MR. SPERLING: In the President's State of the Union, he called for reserving all of the surplus until we had a bipartisan solution for Social Security. He also called for a bipartisan and open dialogue on Social Security, with bipartisan forums throughout the country, in an effort to derail the third-rail mentality that and has often stifled Social Security reform.

That effort has, I think, been largely successful. We saw this year Democrats and Republicans at these forums exchanging ideas. We saw plans come out -- books, studies, press reports. I think that it has been a year that has generated a lot of thoughtful commentary and public attention on the issue of Social Security and why 1999 offers a historic opportunity for us to act together, not because we're in a crisis, but because we have an opportunity to prevent a crisis by acting now, at a time when we can take rational steps and in which we have the benefits of a much stronger fiscal situation to deal from.

The President also said in the State of the Union that he wanted to come back in early 1999 and start a Social Security reform process, working with members of Congress from both parties. The White House conference that we're going to have on December 8th and 9th is in many ways a pivot point that wraps up the bipartisan forums we had this year and starts laying a foundation for the continuing building of trust and working together that we would need to have a long-term Social Security solution done in 1999.

The forum -- the conference will provide a unique opportunity to bring together Democrats and Republicans prior to the beginning of the major legislative action in a context which there will be some open forums that are open to the public, but also by creating a context in which Democrats and Republicans from both the House and Senate can spend time together in a confidential, closed-door session and talk to each other and have the benefits of a well-balanced group of experts helping to facilitate the discussion.

This, we think, would be a positive step in getting people talking to each other and saying that the first start of the Social Security reform is one that will continue, we hope, to be a civil and bipartisan and ultimately productive year and process.

Let me give you some of the details. We have tried to construct this forum as the three previous forums were done. In that case the AARP and the Concord Coalition have largely helped put them together and ensure that they were balanced. We hope that we have done as good a job as they did working with us before to do that.

We will start on December 8th. It's at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel at 10:00 a.m. with an opening session at which the President and Vice President would speak. And we've also asked the leaders, both the House and Senate, to either come or to designate someone to speak in the opening session, which is similar to what we've done in the bipartisan forums.

We will then have a public panel that will talk about the challenges of Social Security reform, particularly focusing on what the fiscal situation is, how the budget surplus does or doesn't change the challenge, so that we can start with an overall context. The two presenters would be Marilyn Moon, from the Urban Institute, and Rudy Penner, who is a former Director of the Congressional Budget Office. And I should mention that Marilyn Moon is currently serving as the public trustee of the Medicare and Social Security Trust Funds.

After a break, we would then have a panel that would look at the ways that Social Security reform will impact on different parts of our population and what types of impacts different reforms will have. In this one, Alicia Munnell, who, you may remember, was a member of the Council of Economic Advisors, and Assistant Secretary of Treasury, now at Boston College, will present, as will Carol Cox Wait, a long-time leader and spokesperson for fiscal discipline. She's head of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and her group did a number of forums throughout the country. Kilolo Kijakazi -- I've been practicing all day -- at the Center of Budget and Policy priorities, and she works on Social Security and other issues affecting disabled Americans. And then Richard Thau, from the Third Millennium Group, who has been a prominent spokesperson for reform and for the perspective of younger adult Americans. Mrs. Clinton will convene this panel, open the second panel.

The third panel will be the longest one, because it will deal with the difficult and provocative proposals on many different sides that involve setting aside, or pre-funding, Social Security in some way that involves getting higher returns through investments in equities or other private sector measures. As you know, some people have proposed them through forms of individual accounts; others have proposed them in terms of Social Security or some form of independent investment board doing the investment themselves.

We have an excellent and, I think, very diverse panel. Henry Aaron at the Brookings Institution -- Henry Aaron and Robert Reischauer just put out a very fine book that goes to many of the issues but also has a specific proposal in there where they call for a Social Security Reserve Board, modeled on the Federal Reserve Board, to do equity investments. Carolyn Weaver, also from the American Enterprise Institute, she has been one of the most prominent spokespersons for more of the individual account proposal, and was identified with one of the three options that was put out by the Social Security Advisory Commission.

Also, to the extent anybody is thought of as being the father of Social Security these days, it's Robert Ball, who was the Commissioner of Social Security under several different Presidents. And if any of us are as productive when we're in our early eighties as he is, we'll all be very happy. He is still active and has just also written a book recently on the issue.

The fourth person is José Piñera, who was Chile's Minister of Labor and Social Security from 1978 until 1980. Chile took a very strong privatization proposal, and he is now at the Cato Institute. I think his perspective is self-evident.

And then Gene Steuerle from the Urban Institute, who has worked with the Breaux, Gregg, Stenholm and Kolbe group on their proposal.