Post Op-Ed That Actually Faces Entitlements Reality...Amazing

Our Entitlement Paralysis

By Robert J. Samuelson

Wednesday, December 28, 2005; Page A21

As noted by recent cover stories in Newsweek and Business Week, the first of the roughly 77 million baby boomers turn 60 in 2006. J. Walker Smith of the polling firm of Yankelovich Partners told Newsweek that many boomers "think they're going to die before they get old" -- a reference to one survey in which boomers defined old age as starting around 80. Business Week asserted that fifty- and sixtysomethings consider their "middle age a new start on life" to indulge hobbies, begin new careers or remarry. These portraits of vigorous baby boomers clash with another reality: Their huge federal retirement benefits may seriously damage the economy and American politics.

Our continued unwillingness to address this disconnect counts as one of 2005's big stories. We should ask ourselves: Why? After all, the need is well known. Consider the Congressional Budget Office's just released projections. By 2030, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid may cost 15 percent of national income -- almost double their level in 2000 and equal to 75 percent of today's federal budget. Left alone, these programs would require massive tax increases, cause immense deficits or crowd out other important government programs. We also know of at least partial solutions: curb costs by slowly raising eligibility ages and cutting benefits for wealthier recipients.

Still, we fiddle. The paralysis is understandable. No one wants to offend older voters, so we dance around the issues without truly engaging them. President Bush's ill-fated plan for "personal" investment accounts in Social Security was a perfect example. The president complained about unaffordable entitlement spending but never said how his plan would cure that problem. There was a reason: It wouldn't. In its first decades, it would mean more spending, not less. Government would pay for personal accounts and traditional benefits.

Democrats correctly saw Bush's proposal as a political attempt to steal their signature issue -- Social Security. For younger voters, the "personal accounts" might make the program a Republican product. It might cease being liberalism's crown jewel. Naturally, Democrats and the AARP denounced Bush's plan. People shouldn't depend on "risky" stocks for Social Security, they said. By July, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 57 percent of the public thought personal accounts a "bad idea." Even many Republicans abandoned Bush.

Doubting Bush's motives is easy, because in 2003, he had engaged in a similar political makeover for Medicare, through his drug benefit. It aimed to ingratiate the president with elderly voters in 2004. But the potential cost is huge. By 2015, the drug benefit could increase Medicare costs by 30 percent, says the CBO. All of Bush's complaints about runaway entitlement spending reek of hypocrisy.

But ascribing today's deadlock exclusively to Bush's clumsy partisanship is too glib. It ignores the many years in which Democrats have shamelessly exploited for political advantage any threats to Social Security and Medicare benefits. It also overlooks the deeper and more intractable source of our stalemate: competing moral claims.

I don't think I'd be so cynical as to describe President Bush's efforts as an effort to turn Social Security into a Republican issue, it was an attempt to turn SSI into what should have been the original intent, a privately supported pension plan independent of government and corporate control. However it is refreshing to see the pages of this bastion of Liberal thought facing the harsh realities of the shortcomings of the socialist model. It is time for American lawmakers to get their collective snouts out of the public trough long enough to solve this problem before we wind up with a bunch of 80-year old pan-handlers under our bridges. Yes this nation is supposed to be based on self-responsibility, but I am neither so naive as to expect everyone in the nation to attend to their responsibilities, nor so cold as to say "let them eat cake" and allow those irresponsible individuals to starve to death. Perhaps public "poorhouses" for the indigent elderly would be the way to proceed.

Full Story: The (Rapidly Approaching) Entitlement Crisis

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