The White House’s drive to privatize (or should it be “piratize“?) Social Security is not getting off to a good start.
The White House, in a private memo to conservative allies, strongly argues that Social Security benefits paid to future retirees must be significantly reduced. The memo disputes those on the right who insist that creating private investment accounts is all that’s needed to fix the retirement system.
To fail to make benefit cuts while diverting payroll taxes to workers’ personal accounts, the memo argues, would be irresponsible and “have serious short-term economic consequences.”
The memo, contained in a Monday e-mail from Peter Wehner, President Bush’s director of strategic initiatives, was marked “not for attribution.” It reflects the White House’s behind-the-scenes efforts to avert a split in Republican ranks over the politically charged Social Security issue.
There’s a lot to this memo, which given the circumstances, doesn’t appear to be a planned leak. As the Wall Street Journal noted, the memo’s discussion of benefit cuts for Social Security recipients “goes beyond anything the president and his team have said publicly about the pain — as lawmakers call benefit reductions — that would accompany a Social Security fix.”
Politically, some realize this could be a political debacle for the ages. Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp, of all people, indicated that sweeping cuts in benefits, such as those touted in this White House memo, would be so widely rejected by the public that they could literally put the GOP congressional majority in jeopardy. It’s a message that seems to have reached current Republican lawmakers loud and clear.
Senate Republicans signaled their wariness yesterday in a private retreat on the year’s legislative agenda with White House adviser Karl Rove. An attendee said the senators gave Mr. Rove “a subtle but clearly identifiable message that the GOP [Grand Old Party] would go along…but they were scared to death.”
Good.
Some congressional Republicans may be willing to go along with this scheme because Bush says so, but others realize that we’re talking about the end of Social Security. Indeed, the memo makes that quite clear.
“For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can win — and in doing so, we can help transform the political and philosophical landscape of the country.”
Like Josh Marshall, I think this is the key sentence in the leaked memo because it captures what this entire effort is all about. After all, what “battle” has been raging for six decades? It certainly isn’t the debate over how best to help Social Security; it’s the GOP-driven debate over whether Social Security is worth having in the first place. They want to seize the moment and do what Republicans have always wanted to do but didn’t have the power to pull off.
In other words, this isn’t about the fiscal soundness of Social Security or the babyboomers moving toward retirement or anything else. As Wehner himself says, this is the best chance the opponents of Social Security have had in six decades of trying to phase-out the program.
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Clearly, this isn’t about ‘saving’ Social Security. It is a battle to end Social Security and replace with something that Wehner clearly understands is very different, indeed the antithesis of Social Security.
This entire debate is about ideology — between people who believe in the benefits Social Security has brought America in the last three-quarters of a century and those who think it was a bad idea from the start. There is an honest debate to have on this point, a values debate. Only, the White House understands that the belief that Social Security was always a bad program isn’t widely shared by Americans. So they have to wrap their effort in a package of lies, harnessing Americans’ desire to save Social Security in their own effort to destroy it.
That’s what makes this memo so interesting. The Bush gang knows if it came right out and said the president wants to do away with the very idea of Social Security, the political response would be ruinous for him and the rest of the Republicans. And yet, the “six decades” remark hints at the underlying drive to do just that.