In the third presidential debate, Bush relied on Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late Democratic senator from New York, as proof of his bi-partisanship on Social Security “reform.”
“I called together a group of our fellow citizens to study the issue. It was a committee chaired by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, a Democrat. And they came up with a variety of ideas for people to look at.”
By invoking Moynihan, Bush seemed to be suggesting that his Social Security committee worked with the White House on a series of ideas relating to the future of the program. It was an example, we were led to believe, of Bush bringing Dems and Republicans together to work towards a common goal. This wasn’t even remotely true.
Ron Suskind, whose name has been in the news a bit, wrote in Slate yesterday that Moynihan, who isn’t alive to decry Bush, resented the White House and the manner in which it approached changing Social Security.
As is typical with most presidential panels, the Social Security commission was stacked from the beginning to produce the results the White House wanted. (As I noted in my book, The Price of Loyalty, all members were pre-approved by the White House’s chief economic and political advisers, Larry Lindsey and Karl Rove. This distressed Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who wanted more balance on the panel.) But to an unusual degree, the White House felt free to strong-arm commissioners who deviated from the Bush game plan, and Moynihan didn’t like it.
In fact, in one memo between Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy Kent Smetters and then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, it was obvious that Moynihan was unhappy.
Moynihan has expressed a considerable amount of frustration that he is not being allowed to control the agenda and in particular, that the White House and Commission Staff are controlling the agenda to a large extent.
Funny, Bush didn’t mention any of this at the debate. I can’t imagine why.
But as long as we’re talking about Bush’s Social Security committee, there’s something else Bush left out that’s particularly relevant now.
This commission, which was charged with “study[ing] the issue,” so long as their research was consistent with everything Bush wanted, ultimately concluded that partial privatization, as the president has proposed, would cost nearly $2 trillion to make up for the money that would be removed from the system.
In other words, the panel that Bush was bragging about at the Tempe debate reached the same conclusions about the White House plan that Kerry did.
In context, Bush’s committee thought this pricetag might be feasible. In 2001, Clinton had handed Bush the largest surpluses in American history, we were paying off the national debt at a record clip, and the long-term fiscal health of the country looked incredibly bright. The idea that the government could handle a $2 trillion transfer to handle partial privitization seemed possible.
Conditions, we now know, changed quickly. Record surpluses have been replaced with record deficits, we’re adding to the debt at a record clip instead of paying it off, and the future looks bleak. Bush’s plan would still cost up to $2 trillion, but now he doesn’t have the money. Moynihan would surely tell him this today.
Ultimately, Bush doesn’t have the cash, doesn’t have an explanation, and doesn’t have the courage to tell voters the truth. Typical.