Your President, the Socialist

If this is the plan, then I think lots of Republicans should be mighty upset.

We should just call this what it is - it's redistribution of wealth, plain and simple. I still think people who want to opt out of the system altogether should be allowed to do so, unfortunately, that's not going to work, given the people who would opt out are the people from whom the wealth is being taken.

So what does progressive indexing mean?
Under current law, the size of a worker's initial retirement check is based in part on how much average wages rose during his or her career. That's known as wage indexing.
In 2001, Bush's Commission to Strengthen Social Security, on which Pozen served, talked about moving from wage indexing to price indexing. That shift would reduce benefits drastically, since prices historically have risen more slowly than wages.
Sometime after the commission disbanded, Pozen came up with the notion of combining the two methods as a way to improve the system's finances without driving lower-income retirees into poverty.
In his plan, he'd retain the more generous wage indexing for people with average career earnings less than $25,000 (the bottom 30 percent as of 2012, his tentative start date). He'd impose price indexing on people who earn more than $113,000 (the top 7 percent) and blend the indexes for everyone in between.
He offers three reasons for adopting this approach even though Social Security already is said to be progressive, in the sense that low-wage workers get bigger retirement checks relative to their contributions than high-wage earners.
One is that people at the low end depend on their checks and need every nickel. The second is that low-wage retirees tend to die sooner than high-wage ones, giving them fewer years to collect benefits.
Third and perhaps most important, he says, is that the federal government already provides huge retirement subsidies for middle- and upper-income Americans through IRAs, 401(k)s and the like. While such tax-advantaged options are open to all Americans, they are used mostly by people who can afford to save.
"For moderate- and upper-income workers, the current system is too generous," Pozen said in an interview, "given the retirement-savings vehicles available and the overall federal budget situation."

I love it. Giving you your money back as promised, well, that's 'too generous'. These people really believe that the money you and I earn is really theirs, and they just let us keep some of it. If this system were proposed as new today, it would never pass. Why isn't there more of a cry to dismantle the current system and start over? Because that would inevitably lead to less government control of the money, and no one, not even your 'smaller government' President wants that.