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May 03, 2005
Too Little
Sometimes a little of a good thing can be incredibly bad for you. That's the case with the details of Social Security reform. Trying to promote the positive aspects of any plan will immediately strike many as disingenuous as the full implications of the proposal become clear. Instead what is needed is an honest plan that will allow Americans to forthrightly confront its pros and cons and go from there. The Bush Administration's current practice of hinting and suggesting and not actually advocating anything other than change in accordance with a few guidelines is doing nothing to advance this debate.
President Bush may have backed his party into a corner when he spoke on April 28th about progressive indexing (see article here). Without a fully developed plan to sell to the public, Congressional Republicans now face an unenviable task. As Howard Gleckman observes:
skittish Republicans must now defend major cuts in promised benefits. They'll say, rightly, that the system doesn't have the funds to pay those benefits in any event. But that's a complicated story -- much more complicated than the Democratic charge that Bush is proposing to cut benefits for an average worker by more than $7,600.
Instead of calling on Congress to lead, President Bush should go on the offensive, adopting more strident language both with our legislators and with the American people. As Jamie Dettmer, director of media relations for the Cato Institute puts it:
Major reform requires political toughness and tenacity and a real thoughtfulness when it comes to explaining why change is necessary. Alas, neither congressional Republicans nor the White House has excelled at presenting the case for reform. They are failing to draw on the rich populist themes of the dignity of ownership and the right to dispose of one's own earnings and savings that can win the political debate.
Posted by Audi Partem Alteram at May 3, 2005 12:12 PM
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