By WALTER P. COOMBS and RALPH E. SHAFFER

They deregulated the airlines and told you competition would lower fares. Next, they opened up telephone service and promised reduced rates. They also assured you that electric bills will shrink as soon as we end government-controlled monopolies in the power industry.

Now that you’ve bought all that, they have one more bridge to sell you. Let them put your Social Security contributions into the stock market, and they’ll guarantee you a secure old age.

Acting like fast-talking telemarketers who prey on the fears of the elderly, the doomsayers continue to argue that the 62-year-old Social Security system will collapse unless draconian measures are taken immediately to resuscitate it. What they don’t say is that they want to privatize the system so Wall Street insiders will be able to skim some $90 billion in commissions.

They’ve been joined by ideologues who have steadfastly and consistently opposed public pensions since President Franklin Roosevelt successfully convinced a hesitant Congress to pass the law. Both groups rely on dubious demographic forecasts and economic models which predict the future based on questionable assumptions and built-in biases.

There is nothing wrong with Social Security that simple, modest changes can’t overcome. All during the system’s life, small corrections have been made which helped preserve the basic institution. There is no reason why that pattern cannot continue.

With no changes whatsoever, the system will continue to take in more than it pays out until 2012 and, with its trust fund surplus, can pay full benefits until 2029 and possibly to 2040 if current GNP rates continue. After that, benefits of at least 75 percent can be paid. With a small increase in Social Security taxes, the system can be continued indefinitely. These are facts that the naysayers refuse to accept.

Americans will agree to a small Social Security tax increase when they understand the benefits that will accrue to individuals and to the national economy. This tax doesn’t just benefit the elderly. In many respects, the real winners are their children, the economy and the social fabric of the nation.

Furthermore, there is a reasonable alternative to an increase in the Social Security tax one that was Roosevelt’s original idea. Abolish the current tax completely and pay for Social Security out of the general revenue of the nation.

Both individuals and businesses would be relieved of the SSI tax, which would certainly be a selling point. Replace it with creative tax reform that might include an energy tax, a national value-added tax (conservatives seem to have no objection to that tax) or an expanded income tax that would lower rates but remove many current exemptions.

Consider how much revenue could be obtained by adding a small tax on each stock sale, each option purchase, each transaction on the various stock exchanges. Funds could be raised by providing a use tax on the franchises of publicly owned airwaves, instead of giving TV and radio stations a free ride by paying no fees to the real owners of those franchises the public. As the information age develops, tax all information transmissions e-mail and the Internet just as we now tax telephone calls.

Better yet, let’s follow Newt Gingrich’s advice. On a nationwide tour, Gingrich predicted budget surpluses of up to $100 billion a year. With part of that surplus, let’s undo the raid Congress made on Social Security in 1983 when the law was changed so that Social Security benefits to the wealthy (but mostly the not-so-wealthy) suddenly became taxable.

Instead of taxing their pensions and transferring that money to the general revenue fund, continue to tax recipients but put the revenue back into the Social Security trust fund. The figures aren’t public, but based on estimates made by a former Social Security commissioner, approximately $11 billion dollars a year is now transferred from the retirement trust fund to the general treasury as a result of the Reagan-Clinton “reforms.” An end to that transfer might make any other fiscal changes in the program unnecessary, because it would return to the trust fund nearly $400 billion by 2029.

Social Security is one of the great successes of a democratic government. Creative ideas that are modest in scope will insure the perpetuity of the system and will guarantee to future generations that when they reach retirement age, a system of social insurance will be there.