If Washington, D.C., were a sovereign country, much of its GDP would consist of exports of paper, in the form of plans for the future of Social Security. Whether offered by liberals or conservatives, almost all of the proposals for Social Security are doomed by political realities that the authors of these plans refuse to acknowledge.
Although there is no short-term Social Security “crisis,” there is a long-term Social Security problem. Last year the program began paying out more than payroll taxes brought in. The Social Security trust fund is projected to make up the difference for a quarter of a century, but around 2037 the trust fund will run out. Thereafter the gap between Social Security’s revenue and spending is projected to be around 2 percent of U.S. GDP. This is less than apocalyptic but it is still a substantial amount of money.
The inadequacy of payroll tax revenues sets the stage for today’s vast number of Social Security plans. Almost all of them share the assumption that, from now until the end of time, Social Security can only be funded by a single tax. That solitary tax is the combined employer-employee payroll tax, which today is set at 12.4 percent of wages below $106,800.
In order to reconcile payroll tax revenues with Social Security expenditures, most conservatives want to cut Social Security benefits. This can be done by changing the way that benefits are indexed to inflation, by forcing Americans to work longer (a benefit cut) or by diverting some payroll tax revenues to the dangerous casino of the stock market (another benefit cut).
Progressives generally prefer to address the future spending shortfall by raising taxes on wage earners rather than cutting the benefits of retirees. As noted above, Americans pay payroll taxes only on wages up to $106,800. Because of increasing wage inequality in America in the last generation, Social Security taxes, which covered 90 percent of wages in 1980, now cover only 83 percent. Increasing the payroll tax until it covers 90 percent of wages once again would plug half of the shortfall. Lifting the lid on Social Security payroll taxes as a percentage of wages entirely could eliminate the funding gap altogether.
Each team in this policy debate backs its proposals with footnoted papers and elaborate computer modeling. In theory, any number of plans that have already been proposed could succeed in making Social Security solvent, by cutting benefits, increasing payroll taxes, or some combination of the two methods. But flawless though they may be in theory, all of the proposals for saving Social Security in its present form may turn out to be monuments to wasted ingenuity.
The reason is politics. Political predictions are dangerous, but I will venture one: When Social Security funding becomes a problem a generation from now, there will not be enough votes in Congress either for the benefit cuts favored by conservatives or for the payroll tax increases favored by liberals.
President George W. Bush’s proposal to cut Social Security benefits by diverting part of the payroll tax to risky and uncertain private accounts was so unpopular that Congress never even considered it — even though Republicans controlled the House and the Senate as well as the presidency. The alternative of means-testing is unpopular as well. To make a real difference, there must be deep cuts for middle-class retirees as well as the rich. And yet according to pollsters, even a majority of Tea Party movement members oppose cuts in Social Security and Medicare. Can any rational conservative really believe that there will be more of an appetite for significant Social Security benefit cuts 10 or 20 years from now, when retirees and the soon-to-retire constitute an even bigger portion of the electorate?
When it comes to Social Security, liberals are just as politically unrealistic as conservatives. It may be mathematically certain that the Social Security shortfall can be cut in half by covering 90 percent of wages and eliminated entirely by lifting the cap on payroll taxation. But the only math that counts is the political math.
The Obama administration defines the middle class as the 98 percent of households making less than $250,000 a year. Only about 2 percent of American households make more than $250,000 a year, and only one in five households makes more than $100,000. But the top 20 percent includes almost all of the college-educated professionals who staff and control both parties and the media. Can any rational progressive really believe that affluent professionals, to say nothing of the rich, will lack the political power 20 or 30 years from now to block massive payroll tax increases targeting them?
The almost certain lack of political support for major benefit cuts and/or major payroll tax increases means that the shortfall in Social Security revenues cannot be solved according to the assumptions underlying today’s bipartisan debate. The assumptions of the debate must therefore be changed. At some point in this century, Social Security must be funded by both the payroll tax and another stream of tax revenue.
Although the architects of Social Security in the 1930s assumed that general revenues would become necessary at some point, most liberals and conservatives today oppose the idea of making up the future Social Security payroll tax shortfall with other taxes. Liberals are afraid that weakening the link between payroll tax contributions and benefits would undermine the legitimacy of Social Security. Conservatives don’t like the notion of shoring up Social Security with non-payroll tax revenues because they would prefer to abolish Social Security altogether, for reasons of right-wing ideology. Failing that, they prefer to use the inadequacy of the payroll tax as an excuse to shrink the program as much as they can, in the name of “saving” it.
But the preferences of liberal and conservative policy wonks do not matter. The only thing that matters is the political situation in the 2030s or 2040s. At some point in the next few decades, it is likely that Congress will channel non-payroll taxes into the Social Security program. Even if it is justified at first as an emergency measure, the bailout will almost certainly become permanent. From that point onward Social Security benefits will be funded both by payroll taxes and by other taxes. The republic will survive, the economy will muddle on and the historians of 2050 or 2100 will find it hard to understand why previous generations thought that Social Security could be funded by payroll taxes alone.
The devil is in the details. In the worst-case scenario, instead of creating a new, stable stream of revenue to supplement the payroll tax, members of Congress would fight every few years over the latest rescue of the Social Security program. The periodic turmoil over short-term fixes for Social Security every few years would resemble today’s scrimmages over transportation bills.
In the best of all possible worlds, Congress would make Social Security solvent on the basis of a blend of payroll and non-payroll taxes that would produce maximum revenue stability with minimum economic distortion. Many other democratic countries, including Canada and Japan, have multi-tiered public retirement systems, with a flat universal benefit topped by an earnings-related benefit. Ever since the late 1930s, some American experts and politicians have favored converting Social Security into a similar “double decker” system (or a triple decker, with the top consisting of tax-favored private savings accounts like IRAs and 401Ks). The World Bank proposed a similar model for most countries in the 1990s.
A flat, universal benefit as part of a double decker system could be funded partly or wholly by non-payroll taxes — general revenues, an earmarked estate tax, or a dedicated portion of a federal value-added tax (VAT). A VAT would be regressive, but so is the existing payroll tax. What counts is the progressivity of the system of federal, state and local taxes and benefits as a whole.
In the past many progressives have opposed the double decker option, fearing that conservatives would try to means-test or eliminate the flat benefit, or eliminate Social Security above the minimum level. Indeed, some conservatives have proposed combining a flat, universal benefit with a private account system as the second tier. But some liberals favor a double decker system because it would provide a minimum benefit to widowed homemakers or a basic income for the elderly poor.
Today these ideas are strictly off-limits, according to the unspoken rules that govern the Social Security debate. For years to come, most progressive experts and conservative experts will continue the sterile intellectual exercise of debating each other about proposed fixes for Social Security based on the premise that the program must be funded exclusively by the payroll tax, from here to eternity. Accepting this premise without any questions, policy wonks will pile further unread tomes atop the ever-growing mountain of quickly forgotten studies.
One thing seems certain. When Social Security financing becomes a serious problem in a decade or two, the debate will no longer be about making the program solvent by cutting benefits or increasing the payroll tax. Instead, the debate will be about how best to fund Social Security by supplementing payroll taxes with taxes of another kind.
With Republicans running the House and a knock-down drag-out fight over the federal budget looming, you can be sure that we’re going to be hearing a lot more about “fixing” Social Security during the months ahead. One clue as to what this might mean can be found in the Roadmap for America’s Future, a game plan outlining the Republican agenda cooked up by the powerful new chairman of the House Budget Committee, Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan.
Most of the Roadmap’s prescriptions for Social Security cover the familiar conservative call for “personal accounts” in which workers invest their payroll taxes into funds managed by the U.S. government. George W. Bush’s failure to get a similar proposal to the floor of a Congress completely controlled by Republicans suggests that it is unlikely any progress will be made in that direction in this Congress. But then comes this:
Modernizing the Retirement Age. When Social Security was enacted, the average life expectancy for men in America was 60 years; for women it was 64. Today, average life expectancy has increased to 75 years for men and 80 years for women. Life expectancies are expected to continue lengthening throughout the century. Given these facts, and the choice among many Americans to work additional years, this proposal extends the gradual increase in the retirement age, from 65 to 67, occurring under existing policies, and speeds it up by 1 year. Once the current-law retirement age reaches 67 in 2026, this proposal continues its progression in line with expected increases in life expectancy. This will have the effect of increasing the retirement age by 1 month every 2 years. The retirement age will gradually increase until it reaches 70 in the next century.
A gradual increase in the Social Security retirement age is the kind of proposal that is just innocuous enough — and seemingly sensible — to get bipartisan support. Ryan is far from alone in pushing the notion. The Fiscal Commission co-chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson made a similar recommendation last fall, and some prominent Democrats, including former Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and former Majority Whip James Clyburn, signaled support for higher retirement ages over this past summer. Life expectancies are rising, Americans are working additional years, and raising the retirement age would save money.
But unless legislators take great care in exactly how they implement a higher retirement age, Ryan’s flat rate hike could be a very bad idea. At least, that is, if we care at all about social equity. Because not all life expectancies are alike. In the U.S., for example, women live longer than men, whites live longer than blacks, and the rich live longer than the poor. We don’t have access to terrific data when it comes to breaking down life span by occupation, but one comprehensive British study divided workers into five different socioeconomic groups and found that, in the lowest group, unskilled manual laborers had the lowest life-span expectancies, while doctors were at the top. (Journalists, if anyone cares, were in the second highest tier. Waiters and waitresses were in the second lowest. )
When you crunch the numbers, the conclusions are stark. The average life expectancy of an African-American in the United States is 67 years. And that’s for all African-Americans, regardless of social class. The average life expectancy of an African-American unskilled manual laborer would undoubtedly be even lower — certainly low enough that a retirement age as high as 70 would discriminate profoundly.
And it gets worse. Although life-span expectancies for all groups have been growing for the last century, the gains have been much stronger for the wealthier classes over the last few decades. Just as income inequality has grown, so has life-span inequality. A study published by the Congressional Budget Office in 2008 found that “there is a growing disparity in life expectancy between individuals with high and low income and between those with more and less education.”
The implications of a continued widening of the gap in life expectancy by socioeconomic status are clear for Social Security … a widening gap would… reduce the program’s progressivity — the extent to which it redistributes resources from high-income to low-income beneficiaries on a lifetime basis.
The numbers tell as brutal a story of the consequences of socioeconomic stratification as one could ask for. The British researchers found that for the cohort of men born between 1972 and 1976, the average life expectancy of a member of the highest socioeconomic class was 71.9 and for the lowest, 66.5. For the cohort born between 2002-2005, life expectancy for those at the top had risen by 8.1 years, to 80. For those at the bottom, only 6.2, to 72.7. In 30 years, the “life-span inequality gap” had risen from 5.4 years to 7.3. A study on U.S. life expectancy by researchers at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services came up with similar evidence of “substantial and increasing disparities in US life expectancy over time”; between 1980 and 2000 “the gap between the least-deprived and most-deprived groups widening from 2.8 years in 1980-82 to 4.5 years in 1998-2000.”
The CBO theorizes that “differences in the availability of high-quality health care before age 65 and in lifelong health habits might play an important role” in explaining the different life expectancies for different socioeconomic ages. So perhaps in a country where everyone had access to good healthcare, there wouldn’t be a growing disparity in expected life spans. But as long as that disparity does exist, and as long as it keeps getting worse, an across-the-board hike in the Social Security retirement age would be one of the most regressive ways we could “fix” the jewel in the American social welfare crown.
President Barack Obama’s plan to cut payroll taxes for a year would provide big savings for many workers, but makes Social Security advocates nervous that it could jeopardize the retirement program’s finances.
The plan is part of a package of tax cuts and extended unemployment benefits that Obama negotiated with Senate Republican leaders. It would cut workers’ share of Social Security taxes by nearly one-third for 2011. Workers making $50,000 in wages would get a $1,000 tax cut; those making $100,000 would get a $2,000 tax cut.
The government would borrow about $112 billion to make Social Security whole. Advocates and some lawmakers worry that relying on borrowed money to fund Social Security could eventually force it to compete with other federal programs for scarce dollars, leading to cuts.
Social Security taxes “ought to be held sacrosanct,” said Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security.
“When you start to signal that the (Social Security) tax levels are negotiable, you end up in long-term trouble, I think, in terms of making absolutely certain that the entitlement funding streams are secure,” Pomeroy said.
Social Security is funded by a 6.2 percent payroll tax on the first $106,800 earned by a worker. The tax is matched by employers. The package negotiated by Obama would reduce the tax paid by workers to 4.2 percent for 2011. Employer rates would stay unchanged.
Obama administration officials say that a payroll tax cut is an efficient way to stimulate the economy by immediately increasing take home pay for about 155 million workers. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office agrees, and many business groups and Republicans support it.
“What came out of the compromise was the idea of the payroll tax holiday, which, frankly, a huge number of economists and other experts had been talking about over the last two years with a lot of support in both political parties,” said Larry Summers, Obama’s chief economic adviser.
The United Auto Workers endorsed the deal, saying, “Working families will likely spend this money in their local communities, creating jobs and stimulating overall growth.”
The payroll tax cut is part of a larger package negotiated by Obama and GOP lawmakers to extend a sweeping array of Bush era tax cuts that expire at the end of the month. Some Democratic lawmakers have balked at the plan, saying it is tilted too much in favor of the rich.
The payroll tax cut would provide relief to any worker earning a wage. It would replace Obama’s Making Work Pay tax credit, which has provided modest increases in most workers’ paychecks for the past two years.
The payroll tax credit would be more generous to individuals making more than $20,000 and married couples making more than $40,000. For those making less, the payroll tax cut would be less than the Making Work Pay credit.
Making Work Pay, which expires at the end of the year, gives workers a tax credit of 6.2 percent of their wages, but it is capped at $400 for individuals and $800 for couples. The credit is phased out for individuals making more than $75,000 and couples making more than $150,000.
A worker would have to make $20,000 in wages for the payroll tax cut to equal the $400 Making Work Pay tax credit; couples would have to make $40,000.
At the wealthy end of the pay scale, workers making $106,800 — the maximum amount of wages subject to Social Security taxes — would see their payroll taxes reduced by $2,136. That worker’s spouse could also get a payroll tax cut of up to $2,136, if he or she makes at least $106,800.
The proposal requires the Treasury Department to replenish Social Security with other government funds, which would have to be borrowed.
“The payroll tax cut has absolutely no effect on the solvency of Social Security,” said White House economic adviser Jason Furman.
Social Security has accumulated a $2.5 trillion trust fund since the 1980s. But the government has borrowed that money to pay for other programs. The Treasury Department has issued special bonds to Social Security, guaranteeing the money will be repaid, with interest.
As aging baby boomers start to retire and strain the system, advocates worry about future benefit cuts. This year, for the first time since the 1980s, Social Security will pay out more in benefits than it collects in payroll taxes. Without changes, Social Security’s trust funds will run out of money by 2037, according to the trustees who oversee the program.
To save money, the leaders of a bipartisan deficit commission recently proposed a gradual increase in the full retirement age, from 67 to 69, drawing opposition from groups representing older people.
“This 2 percent payroll tax cut is the beginning of the end of Social Security as we know it,” said the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, which is led by former Rep. Barbara B. Kennelly, D-Conn. “Worker contributions have successfully funded the program for 75 years and that critical linkage between contributions and benefits is what keeps Social Security a self-funded program.”
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Online:
Social Security Administration: http://www.ssa.gov/
National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare: http://www.ncpssm.org/
With public attention focused on President Obama’s compromise with Republican leaders to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, there has been less discussion about a feature of the deal that could have enormous long-term consequences: the payroll tax holiday.
Under the plan, which still must be approved by the House and Senate, the payroll tax would be cut by 2 percentage points for all wage-earners — meaning that a worker making $40,000 would receive an extra $800 in his or her paycheck over the course of a year. The White House and its defenders are touting this as a way to boost the stalled economy, and it might just do that. But they’re also playing with fire.
For supporters of the program, the use of Social Security tax reductions for economic stimulus is a dangerous political precedent. The tax holiday plays directly into the “Starve the Beast” strategy that conservatives have pursued since the 1980s. After Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, Republicans learned that directly attacking domestic programs was hard to do. When Reagan pushed for cuts in Social Security in 1981, he faced a massive backlash that forced him to back down. President George W. Bush encountered the same fate in 2005 when he tried to spend his political capital on Social Security reform. The lesson was learned. Republicans instead focused on a strategy whereby ongoing tax cuts would gradually leave the federal government with less revenue for new programs and make existing programs susceptible to attack as a result of deficits.
A key reason for the program’s strength has been the sanctity of the Social Security tax, which has been treated as a special tax, distinct from income and corporate taxes, on the grounds that it is linked to a specific government benefit. Every year, Congress uses the funds collected from payroll tax contributions of workers to pay for the benefits of current retirees. “With those damn taxes in there,” Franklin Roosevelt once declared, “no damn politician will ever scrap my Social Security program.”
The Social Security tax served two main political functions. The first has been to create strong ongoing support for the program from those who pay the taxes and those who receive the benefits. Social Security’s contributory tax system creates perceptions of earned rights and helps distinguish the program from welfare. The tax has also made Social Security an inherently conservative program, at least from a fiscal standpoint, which has traditionally allowed many budget hawks — like Wilbur Mills, the old Ways and Means chairman — to support it. Unlike almost any other program, policymakers have been forced to adjust taxes to pay for the short-term obligations of government and to plan for future costs. The contrast with almost any other form of government spending, such as defense and agricultural subsidies, is striking. The design forced Congress to take the unpopular step of raising taxes and cutting benefits in 1977 and 1983 when the system faced insolvency.
Thus, opponents of the program have tried to undercut the payroll tax. From 1935 to 1950, Social Security remained a small and frail program. The program covered only a limited part of the workforce and paled in comparison to Old Age Assistance (a means-tested program for the elderly) that was far more generous. In 1939, Congress abandoned the original plan to build a surplus of revenue to pay for Social Security benefits. During World War II, Congress froze Social Security taxes and in 1944 passed an amendment that authorized the use of general revenue to eventually pay for benefits.
Social Security supporters fought to protect the tax. They realized, as the Social Security Board stated, that the payroll taxes was the “psychological basis” for the program. Social Security supporters warded off the threat when in 1950 Congress passed amendments that prohibited the use of general revenue and ensured that payroll taxes would be the only mechanism through which Social Security benefits were paid for. There have been times when politicians privately thought about this part of the equation. In 1967, for example, LBJ believed that a Social Security tax increase — which was tied to a benefit increase — would help restrain inflation at a time that Congress was refusing to pass a tax surcharge for this purpose. But the White House and Congress were very careful to avoid making this part of public discussions or the explicit reason for any change in the payroll tax rates.
Many liberal economists were never comfortable with this agreement. During the 1970s, as the political scientist Eric Patashnik argued in “Putting Trust in the US Budget,” Keynesian economists challenged the tax structure. They argued that the payroll tax undercut macroeconomic policies. Payroll tax hikes constituted a regressive way to fund benefits and sometimes went into effect when the government was trying to stimulate the economy. There was another strong push to use general revenue. Generally, their efforts failed and the payroll tax remained outside the debates over stimulating or restraining the economy. When Republicans pushed for income and corporate tax cuts after the 1980s, Social Security taxes continued to rise.
By insulating the payroll tax from the perennial debates in Washington over cutting taxes to stimulate demand and investment, politicians have protected the program from short-term economic and partisan pressures.
But this time the situation appears to be different. President Obama and the congressional Republicans agreed to break with this precedent. In the future, proposals to further cut Social Security taxes — including to do so on a permanent basis — will certainly be on the table. Once politicians have tasted the political sweetness of tax cuts, they always come back for more. If they succeed, it will worsen the long-term budgetary challenges facing Social Security and create more room for opponents to attack. Indeed, simply by entering into a bipartisan agreement to change the way that Social Security taxes are discussed, the odds improve that one day, some politician might very well be able to scrap FDR’s program.
Back in 2001, President George W. Bush told reporters during a press conference that his first round of tax cuts weren’t just designed as a “fiscal stimulus.” They could also be thought of as a kind of “fiscal straitjacket for Congress.”
And that’s good for the taxpayers, and it’s incredibly positive news if you’re worried about a federal government that has been growing at a dramatic pace over the past eight years and it has been.
In other words, the tax cuts were an example of the classic “starve the beast” psychology — most often associated with GOP strategist Grover Norquist. By depriving the federal government of revenue, the tax cuts would encourage Congress to be more thrifty.
As everyone knows, Bush’s straitjacket restricted nothing. Bush’s tax cuts busted the budget, turned Clinton’s surplus into a deficit, and left the government unprepared to pay for war, recession or spiraling healthcare costs.
In fact, “starving the beast” has never worked — if we’re talking about the federal government. For the last 30 years, tax cuts have always been followed by increased government spending. The reason why, as explained by Cato Institute’s William Niskinen, is simple. When you enjoy the benefit of services without paying their full cost, you end up consuming more services. If you, as an individual, are required to pay your credit card bill in full at the end of each month, you will consume only as much as you can pay for out of your real income. But if you can roll over the debt, and never pay the piper, you have no incentive to live within your means. The same principle works for government in general.
The conservative hope is that somewhere down the line, the federal government will finally reach a point where it can’t keep borrowing money to pay the bills, and it will finally be forced to cut spending. California offers an instructive example. From a conservative perspective, one might argue that starving the beast has worked in California. Voters made it very difficult to raise taxes but kept adding to the state’s spending commitments. Since states must balance their budgets or declare bankruptcy, California was finally forced into making major cuts to services.
The United States government has no problem borrowing money right now. But Republican intransigence on taxes, in the face of the immense decline in government revenue attributable to the recession, and massive long-term entitlement commitments — specifically, Medicare and Medicaid — do raise the question of how long the status quo can legitimately continue.
Which brings us to the Simpson-Bowles debt panel recommendations. As many observers have noted, the Simpson-Bowles recommendations have no force of law, and are highly unlikely to be approved by a majority of the commission’s panelists. It is not a workable blueprint for fiscal sanity — it is a fantasy. Simpson and Bowles wave their hands at the most pressing fiscal challenge faced by the United States government — rising healthcare costs — and propose a remarkably regressive restructuring of the tax code that would seem to be political suicide for whatever political party attempted to push it through.
Yet even with all those caveats in mind, the panel recommendations are useful as a signpost to the kind of future America faces if Republicans keep blocking tax hikes, while government spending requirements continue to rise. The only reason we even have a debt commission can be attributed to Republican persistence in pursuing their starving-the-beast dream. It hasn’t worked yet, but that doesn’t mean they will give up. You could even argue that the fact that a commission appointed by a Democratic president is so much as proposing cuts to Social Security is all the proof you need that starving the beast is working, at least on a psychological level.
How did a budget-balancing plan that includes major cuts to Medicare and Social Security, along with long-cherished Republican hobby-horses like lower corporate income taxes and tort reform, and, most amazingly, not one single mention of the disastrous fiscal effects of the unpaid-for Bush tax cuts emerge from a commission appointed by a Democratic president? Upon further reflection on the draft recommendations of the debt reduction commission, Democrats can only shake their heads in dismay at what may turn out to be one of President Obama’s most disastrous tactical moves.
It still seems far-fetched to imagine that anything close to the plan put forward by commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson will end up being put into effect — indeed, past history has shown that one of the best possible ways to rally beleaguered Democrats is to launch an attack on Social Security — but that doesn’t diminish the potential negative fallout. Even as Obama was touring the country arguing that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans should be allowed to expire, his own debt reduction commission was cooking up a plan that further lowers the maximum tax rate for the wealthiest Americans. Conservative critics of the administration will wield these recommendations as a club to pound the White House with for the next two years.
It’s hard not to agree with House Progressive Caucus chair Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz:
Real budget reform must begin by allowing the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of earners to expire, as they were always designed to do. This would reduce the debt by at least $680 billion over the next 10 years, according to the Department of the Treasury. The middle class has already been hit extremely hard by the ongoing economic downturn and the housing crisis. The last thing we should do is take more money out of their pockets in the name of a conservative tax cut agenda that favors the wealthy over the rest of us.
How will Obama react to the Frankenstein monster he created? The New York Times’ Jackie Calmes poses the question:
…[T]he proposals will pose a test or an opportunity for Mr. Obama as he adjusts to the election drubbing that cost his party control of the House and reduced its Senate majority — depending on whether he tacks to the political center and embraces them in his own budget early next year, or shifts more to the left and leaves them on the shelf.
The clock is ticking.
President Barack Obama pauses at the stage curtain as he arrives to sign the Claims Resolution Act of 2010 which settles long-standing lawsuits by African American farmers and Native Americans against the federal government, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, part of the White House complex, in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 8, 2010. The act also authorizes $1.15 billion for black farmers who say they were discriminated against by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)(Credit: AP) 
Blank American Social Security card isolated over white background - With clipping path(Credit: Gino Santa Maria) 
(Credit: Library Of Congress) 
President Barack Obama listens to a question during a news conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2010. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)(Credit: Associated Press) 
