In addition, personal accounts can be structured to keep out scam artists and restrict investment strategies that are either too risky or insufficiently aggressive to provide needed retirement benefits. Finally, most proposals for personal accounts are coupled with a safety net to protect any worker, male or female, in the event of misfortune. Sometimes that means raising taxes on workers, as politicians have done 38 times since the program's inception. Other times it means cutting benefits to retirees, such as raising the retirement age. Certainly, if politicians raise taxes high enough or cut benefits enough, Social Security could be made solvent for a few more years.
Trouble is, raising taxes or cutting benefits reduces the value of an already inadequate benefit.
Such actions make the program a worse deal for the people who depend on it most. Forcing women to pay into a system that takes 12.4 percent of their wages only to cheat them of a secure retirement is simply unjust. A new Social Security system of personally controlled accounts would stop that injustice. It would ensure that all Americans would be on the path to real retirement security, not just the path of Social Security's shaky promise. A promise that, for too many women, grows emptier every day.