By Maggie Haberman

Martin O’Malley Unveils His Plan to Expand Social Security

By
Maggie Haberman
Martin O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland, with supporters in Concord, N.H., last month. CJ Gunther/European Pressphoto Agency

Martin O’Malley will lay out a plan on Friday for expanding Social Security, an issue on which he has common cause with another Democratic presidential hopeful, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

In a white paper released early on Friday, Mr. O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, rejects calls to raise the retirement age for Social Security. His plan seeks a big increase in employer-based retirement systems and rejects the idea of privatizing Social Security to keep it solvent.

Mr. O’Malley, like Mr. Sanders, also says that benefits should be increased.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the leading candidate in most Democratic polls, has not said whether she would want to expand Social Security.

Such a move is a dream of groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which is allied with Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. But some Democratic strategists believe that talk of expanding Social Security benefits, as opposed to preserving them as they are, would be difficult to promote in a general election.

Mr. O’Malley, however, will be laying out a plan that could increase pressure on Mrs. Clinton to weigh in on the issue.

Both Mr. O’Malley and Mr. Sanders have made sharper calls for regulating Wall Street than Mrs. Clinton has, particularly on the issue of reviving a version of the Glass-Steagall Act. The defunct banking law, which was repealed under President Bill Clinton, helped regulate large financial institutions. Mrs. Clinton has said she does not believe just one piece of legislation is the answer for preventing Wall Street sins.

Mr. O’Malley’s white paper says that “Social Security has kept millions of elderly Americans out of poverty” since it was put into place in 1935. “Today — following the Great Recession, which decimated the retirement savings of millions of Americans — Social Security remains an especially critical lifeline for our parents and grandparents: without it, more than four in 10 Americans over 65 would be living in poverty,” the paper says. “We cannot ask seniors with modest savings to live on even less.”