The congressional committee most responsible for brokering any potential deal on restructuring Social Security held its first hearing on the issue yesterday, and even before President Bush described his ideas in last night's State of the Union address, the deep skepticism expressed by Democrats on the panel foreshadowed a difficult path ahead.

Members of the Senate Finance Committee questioned the Social Security Agency's chief actuary, Stephen C. Goss, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, director of the Congressional Budget Office, about the urgency of the system's financial problems and potential solutions. They offered slightly different estimates of when the Social Security trust funds will go into the red.

The agency believes that as baby-boomers retire and life expectancy rises, the amount of money promised in benefits will exceed the amount of money coming into the system via payroll taxes by 2018. At that time, it will be necessary to begin draw money for benefits from the program's trust fund.

The agency predicts that in 2042, the trust fund will be exhausted and that payroll taxes at that time will cover only 73 percent of promised benefits. The CBO released new estimates yesterday that are more optimistic, predicting that the flow of cash out of Social Security would not exceed incoming taxes until 2020, and that the trust funds would not be tapped out until 2052.

Democrats saw this as reason to go slow on any fixes and to oppose President Bush's proposal to fund private investment accounts for younger workers, which would divert payroll taxes and could worsen the system's financial condition.

Republicans, backing off some previous White House statements that suggested Social Security faced an immediate crisis, argued for making fixes now to avoid having to make more difficult fixes later.

Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the Republican chairman of the Finance Committee, urged compromise and said it would be irresponsible to "kick the can down the road for the next generation to worry about."

"We have an obligation to keep an open mind," Grassley said. "If we make a commitment to build a bipartisan consensus, those of us on this committee can break down the partisan roadblocks that threaten the future of Social Security. If we go to work now we can make incremental changes that will prevent the need for drastic action, more painful choices in the future."

But many of the panel's Democrats zeroed in on the likelihood that retirement benefits would be reduced under any major restructuring scenario, even though the president has not yet endorsed any overall plan.

They focused on the potential $2 trillion cost over 10 years of creating private accounts -- the president's signature proposal -- which would enlarge the deficit without addressing the Social Security system's long term solvency problem.

"The private account deal does not make Social Security stronger or better," said Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, the president's challenger last year. "This is a triumph of ideology over reason and it's a triumph, frankly, of political rhetoric over good legislation and I think we're going to prove that over the course of these next weeks."

Sen. Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania Republican, said the committee needed to explore the possibility that investing some Social Security taxes in the stock market through private accounts might generate sufficient returns to more than compensate for future reductions in promised benefits.

In response to Democratic criticism about borrowing up to $2 trillion to set up the private accounts, Santorum argued that the government was in "better shape to borrow today" than it will be in the future when the budget is further strained by the rapidly rising costs of Medicaid and Medicare.

Democrats time and again compared the costs of the president's other legislative priorities to the potential problems in Social Security.

When Goss testified that the program's shortfall over the next 75 years would be an estimated $3.7 trillion, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., pointed out that making President Bush's first-term tax cuts permanent -- a top goal of the administration this year -- would cost three times as much.

Santorum said yesterday in a telephone interview that several Democrats on the finance panel had told him they were willing to work toward a bipartisan compromise. But earlier this week, Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada told reporters that he could not name a single Democratic senator who supported the president's goal of giving younger workers the option of diverting a portion of their payroll taxes into private accounts.

Republicans control 55 seats in the Senate, while Democrats hold 44 and generally have the support of the sole Independent, Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont.

Several moderate Republican senators also have expressed reservations about personal accounts. And defeating a filibuster -- a procedure the minority party can use to block passage of controversial legislation -- requires 60 votes.

The Republicans have a far more commanding majority in House, which means that the key compromises needed to move any type of Social Security reform through Congress likely would be fashioned in the Senate.

By Maeve Reston, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Feb 3, 2005

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