While touting the promise of personal savings accounts to a North Hills audience yesterday, Vice President Dick Cheney stressed the administration's willingness to consider a wide range of proposals to reshape the Social Security system.

Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Rep. Melissa Hart welcomes Vice President Dick Cheney to La Roche College yesterday, where Cheney talked about the White House's plans for Social Security. Click photo for larger image.

Cheney's stop at La Roche College was part of a nationwide series of sales calls on behalf of the president's chief domestic priority. For an invited crowd of about 400 sitting on folding chairs in a chilly college gym, and to the larger audience of lawmakers and voters across the country, Cheney's message could be paraphrased as, "Let's make a deal."

"If you have an idea, put it on the table; get into the arena," Cheney said, in the face of polls that have found the public wary about Bush's proposals for Social Security. "We're not going to jump on anybody for suggesting any particular idea. I might not like it; that's all to be negotiated."

Cheney's profession of open-mindedness accompanied a renewed argument for allowing younger workers to put a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes into personal investment accounts. Critics have charged that creating such accounts would weaken Social Security by diverting money needed to pay current beneficiaries while also placing at risk the financial security of future retirees.

By design, most of the audience, and most of the questions to Cheney, were friendly. Bob Glancey, chairman of the Allegheny County Republican Party, asked him why the proportion of contributions eligible for personal accounts wasn't even larger. Mike Rubino, 19, head of the Seton Hill University Young Republicans, asked another approving question on the virtues of private accounts.

Cheney did face some skeptical questioning, however, as other members of the audience challenged him on the likely returns of the investment accounts, and on the fact, which Cheney acknowledged, that establishing personal accounts would not shore up Social Security's long-term financial outlook.

Cheney responded in kind to the generally civil tone of his audience, even in describing the administration's opponents on Social Security. He called AARP, the huge retirees' group that is running television commercials savaging the president's plan, "a worthy organization."

Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Vice President Dick Cheney greets supporters yesterday after a town hall meeting on Social Security at La Roche College. Click photo for larger image.

"Sometimes we're in agreement, do business together, sometimes we don't," he said of the influential organization that provided crucial support to the administration on establishing a prescription drug benefit under Medicare, but which has come under intense fire from some administration allies over the Social Security issue.

Enumerating some of the options for restructuring the retirement system, Cheney mentioned a proposal from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., for lifting the $90,000 ceiling on the amount of income liable to the Social Security tax. President Bush has not ruled out that approach and Cheney mentioned it twice yesterday, although he noted that it would amount to "a big hit," on the self-employed and on small businesses.

Cheney also pointed to a plan offered by Robert Pozen, a former member of Bush's advisory committee on Social Security, for indexing Social Security benefits on a sliding scale according to income.

Under this concept, the growth of future benefits for more affluent beneficiaries would be slowed by tying them to the rate at which prices rise. Retirees with lower incomes would continue to have their benefits linked to the rate at which wages rise, which is faster. This would save the system a lot of money while keeping lower-income retirees "whole," Cheney said.

Burnishing the merits of personal retirement accounts, Cheney pointed to the experience of federal workers who have the option of placing part of their retirement savings in somewhat similar accounts. But that argument fell flat with one of his questioners.

Kim Miller, of Mt. Lebanon, said that she had been a federal employee and invested in the Thrift Savings Plan, "and I didn't do well at all."

Miller was eligible for the plan as a member of the staff of a former Democratic congressman. She is now an employee of the United Steelworkers union, which strongly opposes the president's private accounts proposal.

Responding to Miller, Cheney contended that while private accounts could fluctuate in the short term, history suggested that over the long term of a working life, private capital markets could be expected to yield significantly better returns than those for normal Social Security contributions.

Another questioner, Barbara Bush, an AARP volunteer from the North Hills, pressed Cheney on the fund's solvency, arguing that the creation of private accounts would do nothing to solve that basic issue.

Cheney acknowledged that "other things" still would have to be done to address projected shortfalls, but maintained that private accounts would give individuals the opportunity to make up for whatever belt-tightening the overall program would experience.

"I thought he skirted the question," Bush said later. "With [private accounts], you would just weaken a system that is already weak."

Not surprisingly, Rep. Melissa Hart, R-Bradford Woods, the vice president's co-host for the gathering, offered rave reviews both for Cheney's performance and for the merits of personal savings accounts.

Despite recent poll results suggesting that a majority of the public disagrees with the president's proposal, she predicted that Congress would enact some version of it this year. Hart said sessions like yesterday's would help that happen. She noted poll numbers that showed that, whatever the attitudes on specific remedies, the proportion of the public who viewed Social Security as having serious financial problems had climbed sharply over the last year.

Yesterday's meeting took place a day after Social Security actuaries reported that Social Security would be technically insolvent by 2041, and that its cash flow would move into the red in 2017. Cheney noted those projections, but made no mention of the warning in the same report that the Medicare program faces a significantly graver and more immediate financial crisis.

Cheney came to the North Hills from a similar appearance in Battle Creek, Mich. Earlier in the week he had made the Social Security pitch in California and Nevada, all part of the administration's Sixty Stops in Sixty Days tour -- an effort by Bush, Cheney, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow and other administration luminaries to build momentum for a proposal that has yet to gain legislative traction in the face of solid opposition from Democrats and some Republicans in Congress.