No one in congress actually understands the subtleties of the Social Security program – any bill is doomed to stir up nonsense discussion.

Biggs: The state of the debate on Social Security today is dire. I’ll say that. Just to wind back to where you started it, it is surprising in a way, that Social Security isn’t always in the news. It’s the biggest federal spending program, bigger than Medicare or the military. The Social Security payroll tax, that 12.4 percent, is the biggest tax that most people actually pay—bigger than the income tax. Social Security benefits are the biggest source of income for most retirees. And we’ve literally known for 40 years that Social Security needed to be reformed. It was 40 years ago when we did the 1983 Social Security reforms, and almost immediately after that these long-term deficits started creeping back in. We’ve known since about 1990 that the trust fund would run out somewhere in the mid-2030s.

This is a slow moving demographic problem; but the real issue is that as slow moving as the demographic problem may be, Congress is even slower moving. We have gone 40 years without fixing a problem that’s entirely predictable. The last big push on Social Security reform was the George W. Bush administration. I worked there, and they didn’t get anything done, but Bush was pushing very hard on it. Both sides were very well informed. They understood the issues. They understood the program. Today, Social Security as a policy debate has been dormant for quite some time. Your average member of Congress would struggle to describe how the federal government’s largest program works. They have some points on 3×5 cards, but the subtleties of how the program works, the choices we face, and the costs and benefits of each are largely lost on policymakers today. At the political level of candidates running for president, it’s actually even worse. This is the point where I’m starting to get worried about whether we end up having a hard landing or a soft landing on this issue.