For younger groups, also, aside from the perennial question of benefit levels, there are additional protections which many students believe oldage and survivors insurance ought to provide. Most important and most debated of these is protection against extended total disability, which forces many persons into premature retirement. Such protection is an obvious need, but it is vigorously opposed as too costly, as difficult to guard against abuse, and as an entering wedge to "socialized medicine." There is a widespread belief that sixty would be a more realistic retirement age for women than sixty-five. Some of the conditions and restrictions upon the existing survivors' benefits ought perhaps to be liberalized.
These changes would cost money, some of them a great deal of money. If the cost of each is clearly stated, we can buy as much social security as we care to pay for. If the public system takes over some of the burdens now carried by industry pension plans, the savings can be weighed against the increased social security taxes. As long as we adhere to a fully financed system, improvements will be adopted only if enough people think them worth the cost.
Perhaps it is because so many desirable changes run headlong into the stubborn facts of cost that there is a persistent tendency to try to escape from the limitations inherent in contributory social insurance. The wish to break away from the long-range commitment to future benefits may reflect the fact that we could deal more generously with people now old or approaching old age if we could leave to future Congresses the provision for the far more numerous aged of a later day. But as we have seen, it is more than can reasonably be asked of the younger workers of today that they contribute for their whole working lifetime without any certainty of what they will get in the end. The only way to assure the permanence of old-age and survivors insurance and the values that inhere in it is to guard the essential contributory principle without which it would not have come into being and without which it cannot long endure.