Perhaps the most significant early reaction to President Clinton’s plan to save Social Security came from Rep. Bill Archer: “If you thought a government take-over of health care was bad, just wait until the government becomes an owner of America’s private-sector comnpanies.”

This is an important statement, not because the Texan who heads the House Ways and Means Committee is a great orator or even a particularly good statesman. Congressman Archer’s words resonate because of what they portend.

That is: trivializing a vital issue; obfuscating the facts; turning an effort to solve a genuine problem for the American people into political fight no one truly wins. In short, and in keeping with the health-care debacle to which Rep. Archer alluded, it’s the Harry and Louising of Social Security.

You remember Harry and Louise, that nice couple from TVLand who make a career of rolling their eyes and clucking their tongues at the Clinton proposal to restructure health care. They were so good at what they did, in fact, that the news media quickly turned from reporting on issues of access, cost and coverage to merely taking bets on who’d win that particular day’s rock fight, the president or Congress. The American people lost, of course.

It’s happening again. On Wednesday, the day after the president’s State of the Union address, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan gave his annual State of the Economy address to Congress. Newspaper headlines and television news anchors all shouted with undisguised glee that Mr. Greenspan had virtually shredded Mr. Clinton’s proposal.

Mr. Greenspan did nothing of the sort. He enthusiatically endorsed the Clinton plan to devote 60 percent of the federal budget surplus expected during the next 15 years — some $2.7 trillion — to shoring up Social Security’s cash reserves, since that is roughly the portion of the surplus that comes from excess payroll tax collection. He observed that keeping those trillions where they belong not only would prevent the Aging Boomer crisis, but would make a huge dent in the national debt, now at $5.5 trillion, which would lead to even lower interest rates, encourage private investment and stimulate economic growth.

Yes, the fed chairman did repeat his oft-stated concerns about investing a portion — the administration proposes 15 percent — of the Social Security trust fund in the stock market, saying he saw tremendous difficulty in insulating the market from government manipulation if the government is a major shareholder.

But that is, despite the apoplectic reaction of headline writers, Republican congressmen and others always looking for trouble, a rather small portion of the president’s proposal. With that 15 percent investment, at a reasonable rate of return in a broad market index mutual fund, Social Security stays in the black until 2055. Without the investment, it’s 2050. It’s hardly a deal-breaker.

What the proposal does, however, is open the door for a much-needed discussion on how the trust fund investment can be protected from calamity while it is made to grow at a higher rate than T-bills now provide. Perhaps a sufficient firewall can be built that would protect the market from government tinkering. Perhaps not. It’s worth taking a look.

And it’s a little hard to take Congress’s concerns about government manipulation of free enterprise seriously when it spends a fair amount of its legislative energy writing into law tax breaks, subsidies, freebies and other sweetheart deals for its favorite corporate children. Congress knows tinkering.

The entire debate on Social Security is at a critical point. Those who favor scrapping the system entirely are trying mightily to turn the argument into one of whether retirement planning is best done by the government or private citizens. Social Security is not an individual retirement plan, it was never intended to be one. It is, above all, the best anti-poverty program going, it has provided generations of elderly Americans with a lifeline of support. If Congress wants to strengthen that lifeline, and if it has more courage that it usually demonstrates, it can explore such issues as means-testing, benefits levels and retirement age. Or it can use the Clinton plan as a starting point and treat the market-investment portion for what it is, a detail.

Before the “here we go again” approach gains further currency it might be instructive to recall that when the Clinton administration first proposed health care reform in 1993, some 37 million Americans had no health coverage. Today it’s 45 million. Somewhere, there may be workers, parents, even physicians, who think the system is better today than it was six years ago. Maybe they all live in Rep. Archer’s district. More likely, they can only be found in TVLand.