The limpest of trial balloons hanging over Washington as Congress takes a first step toward privatizing Medicare is the administration’s revival of Social Security reform that would push a portion of it too into private accounts. President Bush is correct to move slowly on this issue, but the time for acting on it at all may have passed two years ago.

That was when his commission studying the issue named the price of reform: $2 trillion, needed to cover current Social Security recipients and those still working invested a portion of their Social Security dollars privately. It was also before the stock market hit bottom, the Enron and WorldCom scandals that robbed many people of their retirement funds and before the latest outrage in mutual-fund investing. Whether private accounts make sense in some limited way, there are a lot of Americans who thought a couple of years ago that they would be retired by now but thanks to investment losses are still heading for work five days a week.

A recent story in The Washington Post says the White House will package Social Security reform with several desirable other programs, “in which minorities receive help buying homes, seniors have a choice of health care, and employees control part of their retirement savings.” The administration further promises that, unlike its previous discussions of reforming Social Security, the new attempt will be more inclusive – opposing groups such as AARP will be invited to air their views alongside supporters at events around the country.

The new approach is welcome but the old problems remain. The largest of these is how to pay for the reform. In 2001, the administration could argue that a combination of spending cuts, temporary deficits and use of the budget surplus would cover the cost of the reform estimated to cost at least $2 trillion. It would not have been a persuasive argument, but it could have been made. Now, with the surplus gone and deficits for years to come, it is not even possible to offer such an argument.

Without the means to fund it, Social Security reform is merely a campaign issue, an idea to fight over with no intention of enacting. Perhaps such an argument’s greatest use is to gauge public trust in stocks and bonds. It would be interesting if, after all that has happened in the last three years, whatever public enthusiasm there was for privatizing part of Social Security had not faded even further.