Should we phase out Social Security? 2 economists debated it for an hour in front of me—then agreed the wealthy have to pay up

Romina Boccia, the director of budget and entitlement policy at the libertarian Cato Institute and co-author of Reimagining Social Security, and Teresa Ghilarducci, a labor economist at the New School for Social Research and a senior research fellow at Arizona State University, spent an hour on NPR’s Open To Debate on the subject, “Should We Phase Out Social Security?” Boccia argued yes. Ghilarducci argued no. Then I asked them a different question: Who is going to make the biggest trade-off in repairing the system? The disagreement mostly evaporated. “It’s going to be those Americans who have the greatest capacity to absorb either benefit reductions or higher taxes that are going to bear the brunt of the cost of reforming the system,” Boccia said. Ghilarducci agreed on the target, if not the method: “The way to get money for Social Security… is going to be at the top.”…