Public policy

PUBLIC POLICY
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(December 9, 2011)
Public Policy
A stable and promising future is what everyone looks for once a person retires; in fact it is the reason why many toil day and night. For this reason, the government should ensure that there is a perfectly running social security scheme to protect its citizens. The social scheme must ensure the best retirement test, the fixed retirement age, the treatment of women and families, and the disability test (Biddle, & Johnson, 2008). This paper tackles how a social security can be financed in a way that will maintain the benefits expected by the people who have paid into it.
Debate over social security reforms has always been raging and sometimes it turns to be a political tool to convince the masses for political gain. President Obama has always opposed the earlier move of the former president Bush to privatize social security. In addition, he has opposed to cutting the benefits or raising the age of retirement. Privatization of social security is a bad idea given that companies will start making profits from taxpayers’ money (Koitz, 2001). The issues of privatization will be very tricky since it will not deal with the long term funding challenges; this is because it will be like funding private accounts which will amount to deficit in accounts. On the other hand raising the retirement age is a punishment to taxpayers who plan in advance the years to work (Roosevelt, 2010). Cutting the benefits is also not fair to those contributing and would bring further complications on those who are already enjoying the benefits. In worst case scenario the benefits can only be modified to suit the funds rather than cutting them all together.
The reforms needed in the social security system are investing the money in bon...