Greenspan Commission

So relief itself becomes a wedge that splits the West before it extracts anything from Russia.

Which is why I'd look at the 1981 Greenspan Commission as the design precedent nobody's invoked.

Where the Greenspan precedent actually bites is the ratchet, not the design.

That commission traded benefits and taxes across a 40-year horizon, and it held because the pain was pre-committed before constituencies could organize against it.

Back in the 1980s, Social Security was running out of money.

And the government formed the Greenspan Commission to try and figure out how to resolve this.

And they did so, and they made changes back in 1983.

I remember that always because it was the year I was born.

Here's what strikes me as the load-bearing question nobody's answered.

Every durable pension fix in the comparative record, Sweden's nineteen ninety-eight notional defined contribution reform, Singapore's CPF, the Greenspan Commission's actuarial framing changed who owns longevity risk and how benefits are calculated.

Spain's twenty twenty-one to twenty twenty-three reforms did touch parameters.

They repealed the sustainability factor and extended calculation periods, but they left the core defined benefit promise intact and pushed adjustment onto revenue.

That's the real binding constraint, and it's institutional, not fiscal.

The legitimacy problem has a mirror image worth naming.

The Greenspan Commission solved it in nineteen eighty-one, not by making adjustment invisible, but by making it bipartisan.

Both parties signed the same actuarial framing so neither could weaponize repeal.

And part of the reason the political will is so wrong is because special interest groups, like the AARP, and by the way, on the right, like Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist's organization, just wanna say no. Um, the AARP, if you go back to the 1983 example, in 1983, Democrats and Republicans came together.

They used a commission, by the way, the Greenspan Commission.

They raised the retirement age, they raised the payroll tax rate, they applied, they expanded coverage, they applied benefits to taxation.

They came up with sort of a bipartisan package.

Um, so it might take us to 2032, or close to it, which is really sad.

Um, number two, a commission.

In 1983, it was the Greenspan Commission.

In 1977, it was based on one of these advisory councils.

...

Greenspan Commission that people, uh, that people miss it from 1983.

You need that forcing event to really focus people's attention.

We don't have that forcing event yet.