Listening to President Bush in the State of the Union speech and again yesterday speaking about Social Security, and listening to the Democrats respond, one gains the clear sense that the debate over this issue is still at an early stage. Here are some questions that policymakers will need to answer – or at least, ask themselves- if the program is to be changed for the better.

For President Bush:

On Wednesday night you said “Social Security was a great moral success of the 20th century.” What did you mean by that?

Yesterday in Fargo, N.D., you said, “Obviously, you don’t want somebody to … upon retirement, take it all out and take it to Vegas. As much as I – nothing against Vegas, except we don’t want the retirement things all gambled away. We want retirement funds to be around for retirement purposes.” Will it be illegal for an American to take his personal retirement account money and go to Vegas? What about taking it and investing it in a risky small business? What about using it to buy a house? Or to pay for a grandchild’s college tuition? Or signing it away to pay for an apartment in a long-term care facility for the elderly? These are all things that people do with savings that they really own. If one can’t do that with personal savings accounts, are the accounts really personal? Are they really savings, and are they really owned by a person and not by the government?

If one can’t take one’s personal account to Las Vegas and gamble it away, can one get a bank loan using the personal savings account as collateral and then gamble away the loan in Vegas? What’s left of the government safety net for the gambler?

You’ve been talking about Social Security in terms of retirement benefits. But other parts of Social Security are a disability benefit program and a program of aid for the disabled poor known as Supplemental Security Income. Would they be affected by the personal accounts?

If the equities portion of the personal accounts is to be invested in stock indexes, will religious investors be able to invest in stocks or indexes that meet their religious requirements or match their values? Or will Catholic and evangelical investors have to invest in companies that make money by distributing pornography, and will Quakers have to invest in defense contractors? If an opt-out isn’t available, is the account really private and really owned? Or is the government making the investment decisions that matter?

Who will vote the proxies on the stock? The account taxpayer/”owner,” a professional money manager, or a government bureaucrat? Will the votes be disclosed?

If the equities portions of the personal accounts are to be invested in stock indexes, will tobacco stocks be included? How would that affect future government decision-making on questions like whether the FDA should regulate or ban cigarettes and whether the Justice Department should press racketeering charges against the tobacco companies?

You spoke last night of “eventually permitting all workers to set aside four percentage points of their payroll taxes in their accounts.” But the payroll tax is 12.4%. If this is such a good idea, why not allow workers to invest all 12.4%?

Aren’t some investors – say, Warren Buffett or Bill Gates – rich or expert enough to be able to invest their personal accounts however they want to, without the government limiting their exposure to risk? Should they be able to opt out?

Why should these personal retirement savings accounts be set up through the Social Security system and not through the existing laws governing Individual Retirement Accounts and 401(k) plans?

If the point here really is to achieve the “moral success” of Social Security – a safety net so that no person in America who is too old to work is desperately poor – why is it necessary to have a huge system that provides benefits to everyone, even the rich and upper middle class? Why not just a guaranteed income floor for genuinely poor old people, funded out of the regular government budget without the charade of payroll taxes and “trust funds” and personal accounts that aren’t really personal?

For the Democrats:

What is your plan for dealing with the future financial shortfalls in the Social Security program that will result from people living longer and from the retirement of the Baby Boom generation? Will you offer any plan, or will you just offer negative attacks on Mr. Bush’s ideas?

Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the Democrat from Illinois who was a top aide to President Clinton, reacted to Mr. Bush’s speech Wednesday night by saying, “We should supplement Social Security rather than try to supplant it. A better alternative is for Congress to promote policies to help Americans save for their retirement, such as encouraging companies to automatically enroll new employees in their 401(k) plans; helping taxpayers deposit their refunds directly and automatically into IRAs; [and] creating a ‘Universal 401(k)’ that is portable from job to job.” Do you agree with Mr. Emanuel? How much would you allow every worker to contribute to a 401(k) or IRA on a tax-deferred basis? How would you make up the lost revenue in the federal budget? And how would you cope with the erosion of the Social Security safety net for those taxpayers who choose not to contribute to these optional plans? Is this approach fair to younger workers, who may end up with a negative implicit rate of return on their payroll tax contributions?

How can you Democratic members of Congress justify your own retirement plan, the federal Thrift Savings Plan, which allows you to invest in stocks for a higher return, while you insist that taxpayers should be stuck with the existing Social Security system, which provides no such option? Isn’t that hypocritical?

No doubt good answers to some of these questions and others like them already exist in the White House, in Congress, and in the think tanks and universities. For others of these questions there may be no good answers, only competing choices and values.

It may be that whatever changes in Social Security are enacted during the Bush administration will be revised later on as the program is refined or improved. It’s true that Social Security has been revised extensively since President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law on August 14, 1935. But as the current caterwauling of the Democrats shows, such changes aren’t always made easily. Which is why it would be far better to take it slowly, giving Congress and the public the chance to sort these questions out carefully and get the answers as right as possible this time around.