My American Enterprise Institute colleague Andrew Biggs uses the actual market returns of the last two decades to see where we would be had George W. Bush’s Social Security proposal became law.

His conclusion: People with low lifetime earnings who had chosen to participate in personal saving accounts would have higher payouts in retirement than the program currently schedules. To a lesser extent, people with medium earnings would also be ahead. High earners would take a tiny cut because Bush’s reforms would have stopped the growth of the program’s traditional benefits. (Under the program as it actually operates, the high-earning retiree of 2025 gets a bigger initial benefit than the high-earning retiree of 2015 did, even after adjusting for inflation. Bush’s reform would have ended this practice.)

Biggs also projects his model into the future. The benefits for the low and medium earners of tomorrow are even bigger, although the very highest earners get a bigger haircut. Across the board, the results would look even better if Biggs were comparing them not to the benefits that the unreformed program has “scheduled” but the ones it has the money to pay.

Those of us who urged the adoption of Bush’s reforms were right. But as Biggs explains, the opportunity to gain these benefits has passed us by. The reforms we have to adopt now to make the program solvent would be harder — and the longer we wait, the harder they will get.