In retreat on Social Security
WASHINGTON
CONGRESSIONAL Republicans who have floundered in their scramble to promote an exit strategy for Iraq are honing skills on an exit strategy for an equally touchy topic -- President Bush's desire to turn Social Security upside down.
With next year's elections looming on the horizon, there does not appear to be a desire to accomplish anything that either deals with the vital program's long-range health or follows Bush's longstanding yearning to partially privatize it.
Instead, the effort is seeking to position electioneering Republicans as being in favor of something that polls and other opinion research indicate is relatively popular.
That something is not investment accounts based on a diversion of some of the revenue from payroll taxes that is used to fund benefits payments to current beneficiaries. The more Bush has roamed the nation this year preaching in theory but avoiding a specific proposal, the lower the idea has sunk in the public's view. One of the few, true-believing exceptions -- with an actual diversion proposal of his own -- is freshman Senator John Sununu, a narrow winner is 2002.
Instead, this month's fad has been the idea of stopping something Republicans and Democrats did throughout the deficit-plagued 1980s and ever since the brief period of large budget surpluses at the end of Bill Clinton's administration. That would be the stealing, or embezzling, or (for euphemism lovers) the borrowing of operating surplus within Social Security to mask the enormous size of the operating deficits for the rest of the hemorrhaging budget.
For now, only a handful have indicated interest in another bad idea -- significant Social Security benefits cuts affecting future middle-income and wealthy retirees in order to protect benefits levels for the poor. The first politician to front for this idea all by itself with no other proposals like private investment accounts attached is a non-threatened incumbent, Senator Robert Bennett of Utah.
As with every Social Security idea of the last generation, the political reality is that nothing will or should happen legislatively without clear support from leading members of both political parties. There is no impending crisis in Social Security that requires squandering the vital elements of balance and consensus to advance some half-baked scheme.
Also for the moment, the leadership of the Democrats is confronting all this activity with half of a position. As articulated by Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the position is no negotiations and no deals until Bush takes partial privatization completely off the table. That is not an extreme position. Privatization comes with either no proposal to fund the trillion bucks or so that it would cost over a decade (Bush's current position), no comprehensive plan to close the system's long-range financial problem, or it comes with ideas that would hurt working families and middle-income retirees without asking a dime of sacrifice from the well-off.
Progressive opinion, however, needs more than this, especially a simple notion to confront the benefits-cutters like Bennett who over the years have successfully appealed to fiscal conservatives in both parties. That simple notion is that shoring up the system over the rest of this century must be a balanced effort, dealing with both revenues and expenditures, and that the impact must be concentrated on those who already are the most comfortable.
Ideas like Bennett's, which the president has encouraged to get a broader debate started, are basically fair in their arrangement of future benefits cuts. However, it is ridiculous that they ignore the other half of the problem, revenues. The obvious place to start, and even a few Republicans agree, is the existing ceiling in payroll tax law that stops taxes at roughly $90,000 in income.
This insistence on consensus and balance is what produced the operating surplus within Social Security of roughly $100 billion annually that will last at least another decade and technically is used to purchase US Treasury bonds. Those bonds' proceeds could have financed the system indefinitely, but the proceeds have instead been stolen to cover the flood of red ink that plagued first the Reagan and now the Bush years.
The prospect of any legislation this year or next is extremely doubtful, especially in the Senate. The major remaining question is whether the House GOP leadership will abandon its once-firm position that no member's neck should be stuck out until the Senate has acted and whether House Ways and Means Committee chairman Bill Thomas of California will get his wish to advance a much broader proposal fitting partial privatization and long-range fixes within major changes in pension laws, Medicare, and long-term healthcare this summer.
Solid Democrats from Clinton and Al Gore to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan and former senator Bob Kerrey have for years favored both reform and investment accounts not funded out of existing revenues.
What is being advanced now is neither. The vital consensus probably still requires verdicts from the voters both next year and in 2008. The latest conservative ideas involve political exit strategies, not responsible reform.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com. 
