Publications by Adam Carasso for Retirement Policy

The inadequacy of the current U.S. public and private pension systems may warrant the establishment of a universal pension system (UPS), which would cover all workers—full-time and part-time—and require them to contribute at a level that can help provide them with adequate incomes when they retire. This paper develops options for a system of individual accounts to which, starting in 2007, each employee or self-employed worker would be required to contribute 3 percent of covered payroll (i.e., 3 percent of up to $97,500 in 2007). The UPS we describe would raise the total "replacement rate" for average wage men to 49.0 percent of final wages—provided Social Security is fixed—or 39.8 percent if not

This study reports on trends in federal spending on children from 1960 to 2017, looking across over 100 major federal programs, including tax credits and exemptions. Children's spending increasingly shifted from broad-based programs to programs targeting low-income or special needs children over the 1960 to 2006 period. Thirteen major programs enacted between 1960 and 2006, which include Medicaid, the earned income tax credit, and Food Stamps, comprised 65 percent of federal spending on children in 2006. Overall, federal children's spending increased in real terms from $53 billion in 1960 to $333 billion in 2006, or from 1.9 to 2.6 percent of GDP. Yet as a share of federal domestic spending, children's spending declined from 20.1 to 15.4 percent. Meanwhile, spending on the automatically growing, non-child portions of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, nearly quadrupled from 2.0 to 7.6 percent of GDP ($58 billion to $993 billion) over the same time period. Over the next ten years, children's programs are scheduled to decline both as a share of GDP and domestic spending, because they do not compete on a level playing field with these rapidly growing entitlement programs.

Widening access to retirement savings vehicles and increasing the accumulations within these vehicles could help secure the future for many lower-income families. Currently, the role played by private pensions in asset building is small to nonexistent for most poor and lower-middle class workers. Instead, these persons rely primarily on Social Security and the savings in their home equity, if any, to sustain them in retirement. This brief, based on feedback from a roundtable of experts convened at the Urban Institute, provides background data on the assets of US households and discusses options for increasing levels of saving and retirement security for low- and moderate-income families.

To encourage saving for retirement, private pensions such as employer sponsored 401(k) plans or IRAs receive favorable tax treatment by the federal government. A major goal of such tax provisions is to increase personal saving. A measure of the value of these tax benefits is provided by the Treasury Department, and the National Income and Product Accounts contains a measure of personal saving. With the sudden drop in personal savings in 1999 and its steady decline in more recent recession years, government tax expenditures on pension benefits began to approach the personal savings level by the end of the 1990s.

This brief note describes the assumptions and methods behind the USA TODAY's Social Security and Medicare Lifetime Benefits Calculator, which uses tabulations produced by C. Eugene Steuerle and Adam Carasso of the Urban Institute.

Social Security was designed to redistribute income from those with higher lifetime earnings to those with lower lifetime earnings. The reason is obvious: the system was created to ensure an adequate retirement income for the elderly. Less obvious is how Social Security's many provisions interact to achieve redistribution. This Straight Talk summarizes the most comprehensive study of those interactions to date, concluding that less-educated, lower-income, and nonwhite groups benefit little or not at all from redistribution in the old age and survivors insurance (OASI) part of Social Security. However, there is substantial redistribution to women, who historically have had lower lifetime earnings than men.

This brief, building on the discussion of progressivity in Straight Talk 37, shows how including Disability Insurance (DI) restores very modest levels of progressivity to the Social Security system as a whole. That is, some lower lifetime earnings groups that fall victim to regressive trends under the Old-Age Survivors' Insurance program find their situation considerably improved or reversed when DI is added to the mix, in the form of higher internal rates of return on the benefits they receive over a lifetime. Generally, we find that black men, those earning in the bottom quintile, and those dropping out of high school have a greater chance of receiving DI than other groups.

In one of the most comprehensive, intergenerational studies on Social Security's redistribution of lifetime income, the authors find that (1) Social Security, or Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI), is slightly progressive in that persons with high lifetime earnings on average receive lower rates of return than persons with low lifetime earnings; (2) For most generations, the retirement component (OASI) by itself achieves little if any redistribution across income groups, while Disability Insurance (DI) is progressive, it is a relatively small program, and so does not affect overall redistribution under OASDI, except for key groups; and (3) The groups who benefit most when DI is "added" to OASI are men, workers in the bottom earnings quintile, high school dropouts, and minorities. [© Brookings Institution]

In reviewing reform proposals, lawmakers typically assess the adequacy of retirement benefits by looking just at annual benefits in the Social Security program alone. However, it is the lifetime package of retirement benefits--including Medicare--that gives the most comprehensive picture of what government is being asked to provide for the elderly. Moreover, it is only by considering benefits as a whole that reformers can consider trade-offs among cash versus medical benefits, more years of retirement versus higher annual benefits, and benefits for the very old versus the younger old. This brief estimates the value of lifetime retirement benefits and taxes promised under current law.

In this paper, we assess the extent to which redistributive trends within Social Security are affected when the Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) program is converted to an OASDI program through the addition of Disability Insurance (DI). Our analysis covers four cohorts spanning 1931-1964, using a preliminary version of the jointly developed Modeling Income in the Near Term (MINT) model, version 3. We present detailed measures of redistribution - before and after accounting for Disability Insurance - based on beneficiaries' "own," "received," and "shared" benefits and broken out by gender, race, educational attainment, and lifetime earnings quintile. We then use these measures to comment on the amount of redistribution and progressivity the DI program introduces into the system and the extent to which various groups do or do not benefit.

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