Kansas Attorney Lawyer

It is the day before President Clinton is to visit Penn Valley Community College for a town meeting on Social Security. And as a dozen students in Randy Kidd’s accounting class file in, they are being asked whether they think they will receive Social Security when it is their time to retire.

Not one expresses confidence that they will.

Many of them are a bit vague on how the program works, but their instructor understands it quite well – and given his position, he is just the sort of person Social Security’s supporters hope to rely on to bring around those who think the program is hopelessly headed for bankruptcy.

But they’ll have to look elsewhere. “To tell you the truth, I’d be willing to give back all the money I’ve already contributed if I could simply be allowed to save and invest my own Social Security contributions going forward,” said Kidd, 42.

The unmistakable sentiment in favor of overhauling a program once considered the government’s most admired is everywhere in this city of Hallmark sentimentality, hot barbecue and cool midwestern practicality. The government pension program has a problem, and most everyone here seems to know it.

Right now, more money flows into the Social Security trust fund than is paid out. But when baby boomers start retiring, that reserve will begin to disappear. To prepare for that day, President Clinton is kicking off a series of four town hall meetings starting with one here Tuesday, when reform proposals will be debated.

Among the options are cutting benefits, raising the age at which retirees become eligible, or redesigning the current system in favor of one in which workers would be required to contribute to personal security accounts that they or the government would manage.

It is the last option, or at least some version of it, that seems to be gaining popularity not just in Kansas City but around the country. As a result, the political burden seems to have shifted, from those who want radical change to those who would keep things as they are.

It’s not so much that people are angry about contributing money every week to a system they believe they won’t get to enjoy, or even that they’re unwilling to subsidize the poor or the elderly as part of a national pension scheme.

It’s just that, well, they’re pretty sure they could do better by investing at least some of their Social Security money on their own. That sentiment appears to cut across both race and class for those who are a decade or more from retirement.

“I think it’s probably a good thing that people become responsible for their own financial future,” said Monique Gustafson, 27, as she sipped a cafe latte in the trendy Country Club Plaza shopping district last weekend, accompanied by her husband, an engineer, and an aging lapdog, Nikki.

“I guess when it comes down to it, I’d rather take the risks of the market than the risks of the government running the program into the ground,” said Thomas Norman, 51, a farmer from Lynwood, Kan., during a break last weekend at a personal finance conference sponsored by the Kansas City Star.

That, of course, was the line being pushed at dozens of booths set up at the fair by financial services companies, which have a big interest in fueling the somewhat misleading impression that Social Security will go bankrupt in the next 35 years – the fund’s trustees say that even if nothing is done, future retirees would still receive 75 percent of the current level of benefits, even after allowing for inflation.