SENIORS ON SOCIAL SECURITY

Even before President Bush pulls together conflicting views and fears in his own party and says what he means about “saving” Social Security, the powerful AARP is floating its own far simpler and far less scary plan.

The 35.6 million-member organization unexpectedly became Mr. Bush’s ally two years ago in helping push through the controversial Medicare law that created a prescription drug benefit. William Novelli, head of the lobby, took some knocks from left and right for that assist, which was enormously expensive and threatened existing employer-financed drug plans.

On Social Security, however, the organization has broken decisively with the Bush administration. On the key feature of the awaited Bush plan, Mr. Novelli has declared that the AARP will oppose private accounts that would divert tax money from Social Security. He also took issue with the president’s insistence that Social Security faces a crisis, saying the costly private accounts are not necessary to shore up the 70-year-old retirement program for many years to come.

“We are dead set against carving private accounts out of Social Security taxes,” he told USA Today. “We can fix Social Security without dismantling it, which is what private accounts carved out of Social Security do.”

Here are some possible changes that the AARP has developed after surveying seniors over the past year, as reported in The Wall Street Journal:

. Raise the cap on taxable wages to $140,000 from the present $90,000. The present payroll tax of 12.4 percent, split evenly between employers and employees, is clearly regressive. AARP calculates that this would cover 43 percent of the projected shortfall over the next 75 years.

. Raise the retirement age for full benefits gradually to 70 by 2083, for an additional 38 percent of the gap.

. Reduce starting benefits slightly to reflect longer life spans, for another 25 percent.

. Increase payroll taxes by one-quarter percentage point each for employers and employees, for another 24 percent.

Those measures alone would more than keep the system solvent for 75 years. Still other possibilities include changing the benefits calculation, modifying the cost-of-living formula, investing some Social Security funds in market index funds and putting new state and local government employees on Social Security.

Many leading conservatives have hated Social Security ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed it through in 1935 with heavy congressional majorities. They have called it socialistic and a Ponzi scheme. But President Reagan made only a brief stab at restricting it before being talked out of it by his political advisers. Newt Gingrich didn’t dare confront it in his drastic 1994 “Contract with America.”

President Bush professes to support Social Security but seems determined to cut it back while declaring that he is trying to save it.

With the AARP on the case, he may find that Social Security is, indeed, the political “third rail” that his predecessors have called it. The group’s opposition “is close to fatal,” says just-retired Sen. John Breaux, a conservative Democrat who worked on such issues, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal.