Refighting an Old Battle

A Wall Street Journal columnist, Mary Anastasia O’Grady, said it plainly: “George W. Bush’s plan to create personal retirement accounts is not simply an actuarial adjustment designed to boost old-age financial security. It is a lunge for the jugular vein of the welfare state.”

And Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth and the Cato Institute said: “Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state. If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state.”

There’s a good chance that most Americans aren’t looking to lunge at jugular veins or jab underbellies. They want a system that will keep them out of poverty in their old age. The administration, which doesn’t seem to like one of government’s most successful social programs, has declared Social Security is facing a crisis, when it should have declared that it spotted an ideological opportunity – a distant but real shortfall. Given the dozen answers that would keep Social Security solvent for many more decades, it chose the one that most dramatically alters the program’s structure.

If Congress is worth anything in this debate, it won’t let that happen. It will insist on reviewing all the options and put ideology aside to ensure a retirement system is in place so that today’s contributors to Social Security know they will get something in return when they retire.

In his State of the Union address, President Bush hailed Social Security as “one of America’s most important institutions, a symbol of the trust between the generations” and “a great moral success of the 20th century,” albeit one that now needs “wise and effective reform.”

That almost sounds like President Franklin D. Roosevelt who in the 1930s spoke of a “rendezvous with destiny” and began leading the nation out of the Great Depression. His opponent in the 1932 election, Herbert Hoover, had said that grass would grow in the streets if FDR won. He did win, overwhelmingly, and pushed through a New Deal that featured universal retirement insurance, unemployment insurance and other elements of a safety net. Few now remember the horrors of the Depression with its bread lines and “Hoover-villes,” makeshift shanties often built in railroad underpasses.

Opponents labeled the whole program socialistic, and, in the 1960s, a strong countermovement developed, taking its spirit from Friedrich von Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” and its leadership from the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. Barry Goldwater, with the encouragement of Professor Friedman, won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964 on an extremist platform but was overwhelmingly defeated.

Now the attack comes through the “Ownership Society,” which includes the president’s plan to slice away one-third of Social Security payments for personal accounts. But notice that ideas such as personal trust funds, scheduled to start this spring in Britain, or the Save More Tomorrow Accounts, which are employment-based prescriptive retirement savings, aren’t part of the president’s solution. Both of these – and there are plenty of other ideas out there – provide individuals with ownership of substantial savings and neither cost the government very much. They do, however, leave Social Security alone – to be repaired by 2042 through raising the top taxable income level or reducing benefits for the wealthy.

Congress must make sure all ways of keeping retirees out of poverty are considered before the reform of this vital program has begun.