This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 30, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Entitlements will have to be front and center in any serious discussion about shrinking

the burden of government for the long haul.

Some new plans for Social Security are now on the table.

Fakadish Goklay is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Social Security,

a fresh look at policy alternatives.

The fiscal commission headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson has a not very detailed plan for Social Security as part of a bigger

mix to reduce the cost of government, relatively speaking, over the long haul, what do they propose that we do

with Social Security, at least on the two sides of the equation, the revenue,

inflows and outflows.

Well, there are several proposals

and there are bits and pieces borrowed

from the proposals or packages that other reform-minded economists and budget analysts have put forth.

And several of the proposals reduce benefits directly by changing the indexing of benefits,

introducing a new bend point in the benefit formula and generally

progressive, increasing the progressivity of the benefit

formula so that higherness would pay, would receive less benefits

in the future.

They also have revenue side changes

such as increasing the taxable maximum income limit.

By my reckoning that change is not going to do much because the

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