Up until now, Democrats have largely criticized Bush's private accounts for social security on the grounds that they do nothing to secure long range solvency to the program. At least when they aren't busy denying that there is a solvency problem, or insisting that the problem, like the eventual exhaustion of the sun's hydrogen, lies so far in the future that we need not worry about it.
Solvency can only be secured either by raising taxes or cutting benefits. Now that Bush has, amazingly, broached the subject of cutting benefits, how do the Democrats respond? By screaming bloody murder. Consider the Clean Cut Kid: "John Thune Wants to Steal Your Social Security Money." Now there's maturity in phrasing.
Make no mistake about it, progressive indexing is just another scheme to rob working people of the money they have already paid into the system through taxation on every dollar they worked to earn. I’ve always pretty much assumed that Bush was on the side of big corporations and the upper class, but I never seriously thought he was actually working against those who work for a living.
So we can't cut benefits. I suppose that leaves a large increase in social security taxes. Well, let Tim Johnson run that one up the flag and see who salutes.
In his Washington Post OpEd, Michael Kinsley, of all people, praises Bush's honesty, during his press conference, on a number of topics.
There was a remarkable amount of honesty and near-honesty. Bush's rebuff to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was superb. The people who oppose his judgeship nominees aren't prejudiced against religion, he said. They do it because they have a different "judicial philosophy." That is exactly the point. ...A straightforward debate about judicial philosophy is indeed what we need.
Then it got even better. Starting with the cliche that in America you can "worship any way you want," Bush plunged gratuitously into a declaration that "if you choose not to worship, you're equally as patriotic as somebody who does worship." How long has it been, in this preacher-spooked nation, since a politician, let alone the president, has spoken out in defense of non-believers?
Of course in the latter case it wasn't really honesty Kinsley was praising, but magnanimity. But the most important example of Bush's honesty was on Social Security.
Social Security is entirely about writing checks: Money goes in, money goes out. . . . The problem is fewer and fewer workers supporting more and more retirees, and there are only two possible solutions: Someone has to pay more in, and/or someone has to take less out.
Bush didn't go from explicitly denying this to explicitly admitting it. But he went from implicitly suggesting that his privatization scheme is a pain-free solution to implicitly endorsing a plan for serious benefit cuts. For a politician, that's an admirable difference.
Even more to Bush's credit, the plan he's backing is highly progressive. Benefits for low-income workers would keep rising with average wages, as now, but benefits for middle- and high-income people would be geared more toward merely keeping up with inflation. This allows Bush to say that no one's benefits will be cut, although some people will be getting as much as 40 percent less than they are currently promised.
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