Chuck Grassley’s rose-tinted glasses

Yesterday’s mini-showdown between Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Chuck Grassely (R-Iowa) over Social Security on Meet the Press went pretty well, but there was one comment that stood out for me.

Grassley was arguing that it’s irresponsible to put off problems for the future. In fact, he quoted Rangel as having said, “When the roof is leaking, you fix it on a sunny day.” The odd part, however, was Grassley’s argument that today is that sunny day.

“Right now we have a very sunny day for Social Security. It’s the time to fix Social Security…. By working on this right now, we’ve got the calm and peace to do it the right way and do it forever to make sure our children and grandchildren have the same good deal that I’ve got.” (emphasis added)

First, it’s bizarre that Grassley, who repeatedly defended the White House approach, believes Bush’s privatization is a helpful long-term solution. Bush’s scheme accelerates the rate at which Social Security expenditures exceed revenues, and more importantly, does literally nothing to address the system’s long-term deficits, about which Grassley claims to be worried.

But then there’s the idea that Grassley, among other Republicans, considers the status quo “calm and peace.” This actually explains a lot.

Let’s see, we’re engaged in two wars, with the threat of more on the way; we’re spending more on the military now than we were at the height of the Cold War; and we have the biggest budget deficit in the history of the world, with a White House anxious to add trillions more to the debt over the next decade.

Chuck Grassley, by no means a card-carrying member of the GOP’s “loony caucus,” considers this “calm and peace”? What, pray tell, would “tense and war” look like? Or, as Rangel put it, “If the senator thinks that we’re living through sunny economic days now, I hate to see what he would call a rainstorm.”