ThinkProgress caught Republican presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty trying to redefine an unpopular "solution" to the Social Security "crisis." But instead of raising your retirement age, he wants to "correlate your retirement."
During an interview with CNN’s Elliot Spitzer, Pawlenty said that, due to the nation’s fiscal position, young people will have to “correlate your retirement…to life expectancy“:
There’s other things that we can do that I think most Americans, Republicans and Democrats — because look, we’re in a hole. And we don’t have perfect options. We’re going to have to do some other things too. I would say that the new entrants into the program, we’re going to correlate your retirement. Not for the people already there, to life expectancy in the future in some reasonable way. And there’s other things like that. You add them up and they get to go a long ways towards solving the problem.
Pawlenty never used the words “raise the retirement age,” but “correlate your retirement…to life expectancy” means precisely the same thing.
You know what would be a really smart course for President Obama and Democrats? Leaving all talk of "correlating" retirement, raising the retirement age, means testing, and every other backdoor approach to privatizing Social Security to the Republicans. A Democratic party that fights to protect Social Security is a Democratic party that wins. Just look at 2006.