Chief economist for the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation and formerly with the U.S. Department of Labor, Richard A. Ippolito shows how pension plans can attract and retain more dedicated and productive workers. He also offers a blueprint for revising the social security plan with work incentives that would strengthen the system's financial condition.

There have been many proposals to restructure the Social Security (SS) system to include individual accounts. Many who favor individual accounts proposals point to the low rates of return (RoR) that workers can expect from the current system & the opportunity that individual accounts would offer for improving RoR on retirement contributions. Opponents of individual accounts have taken exception to the usefulness & validity of focusing on RoR. This report: (1) examines estimates of SSs RoR for different birth years, earnings levels, households, & other demographic groupings; (2) examines RoR available on private market investments; & (3) discusses the issues that arise from comparing SS & market RoR.

Many of us suspect that Social Security faces eventual bankruptcy. But the government projects its future finances using long outdated methods. Employing a more up-to-date approach, Jagadeesh Gokhale here argues that the program faces insolvency far sooner than previously thought. To assess Social Security’s fate more accurately under current and alternative policies, Gokhale constructs a detailed simulation of the forces shaping American demographics and the economy to project their future evolution. He then uses this simulation to analyze six prominent Social Security reform packages—two liberal, two centrist, and two conservative—to demonstrate how far they would restore the program’s financial health and which population groups would be helped or hurt in the process. Arguments over Social Security have raged for decades, but they have taken place in a relative informational vacuum; Social Security provides the necessary bedrock of analysis that will prove vital for anyone with a stake in this important debate.