This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 6, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Social securities finances won't get better without serious reform and proposed reforms vary widely.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Jagadish Goklay is author of the new book Social Security

a fresh look at policy alternatives.

In it he evaluates the major conservative and liberal plans for reform.

Well clearly the two extremes are on the conservative side analysts or people on the political right want to implement structural reforms to the system

beyond just fixing its financial shortfall because they perceive the

current system as being unfair because it treats certain groups less well than others financially speaking.

It causes a lot of bad incentives in terms of retiring early even though you're healthy

saving less and long-range disincentives to acquire education because if you're not going to use that education for a long period of time because you're retired early is then not worth acquiring that education in the first place as much.

So all of these incentives are anti-growth and along with the unfairness of the fiscal treatment or what we call

imposing different tax burdens on different types of groups.

For example, if you belong to a group that have

a high mortality on average, then you don't collect benefits

for as long, so your lifetime taxes you pay are much larger than some

other groups who have high, low mortality rather.

The chief example that people use is black men in the United States

Live through their early 70s whereas white men and women live through their late 70s or early 80s on average, which means

they collect many more years of benefits.

And if you have any regard for equity in a system where you pay your whole life.

And this looks like systematic discrimination

...