Saving Social Security: A Proposal for Reform

Speaker Biographies

January 29, 2004

Peter Diamond is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1966. He has been president of the Econometric Society and the American Economic Association and is a founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, where he has been president and chairman of its Board of Trustees. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was the recipient of the 1980 Mahalanobis Memorial Award and the 1994 Nemmers Prize. He won the 2004 Paul A Samuelson Award for his book, Taxation, Incomplete Markets and Social Security.

Eric M. Engen is a resident scholar at AEI, where his research focuses on tax and budget policy, Social Security, household saving behavior, financial markets, and the macro economy. Mr. Engen is currently working on a book titled Social Security Reform: Sorting out the Sense from the Nonsense. He is the author or coauthor of many academic articles published in the American Economic Review, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Federal Reserve Bulletin, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Monetary Economics, National Tax Journal, and Tax Notes. Before joining AEI, Mr. Engen was a section chief and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Board. He also was an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California–Los Angeles and a faculty research fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research. Mr. Engen received the National Tax Association’s Doctoral Dissertation Award in Government Finance and Taxation in 1992.

Kevin A. Hassett is director of economic policy studies and resident scholar at AEI. Before joining AEI, Mr. Hassett was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and an associate professor of economics and finance at the Graduate School of Business of Columbia University. He was the chief economic adviser to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) during the 2000 primaries. He has also served as a policy consultant to the U.S. Department of the Treasury during both the former Bush and Clinton administrations. Mr. Hassett is a member of the Joint Committee on Taxation’s Dynamic Scoring Advisory Panel. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of six books on economics and economic policy. He has published scholarly articles in the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Public Economics, and many other professional journals. His popular writings have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic Monthly, USA Today, the Washington Post, and numerous other outlets. His economic commentaries are regularly aired on radio and television, including recent appearances on the Today Show, the CBS Morning Show, Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Hardball, Moneyline, and Power Lunch.

Maya MacGuineas is executive director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and director of the Retirement Security Program for the New America Foundation. As the director of its Fiscal Policy Program, she oversees the foundation’s efforts to bring accountability to the budget process, address the challenges presented by the nation’s under-funded entitlements programs, and propose comprehensive tax reforms that would improve both the efficiency and equity of the tax code. Ms. MacGuineas testifies regularly before Congress and has published broadly, including articles in the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, and the Los Angeles Times. Previously, she served as a Social Security adviser to the John McCain for President Campaign. She has also worked at the Brookings Institution, the Concord Coalition, and on Wall Street.

Peter R. Orszag is the Joseph A. Pechman Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and a codirector of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. He is the coauthor of Saving Social Security: A Balanced Approach (Brookings Institution Press, 2004) and Protecting the American Homeland: A Preliminary Analysis (Brookings Institution Press, 2002) and the coeditor of American Economic Policy in the 1990s (MIT Press, 2002). Mr. Orszag previously served as special assistant to the president for economic policy at the White House and as senior economist and senior adviser on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. His current areas of research include fiscal and tax policy, Social Security, pensions, higher education, and homeland security. Mr. Orszag has testified on numerous occasions before Congress and is a regular commentator on economic policy in the national press.

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