In case you were starting to wonder whether Kentucky investment banker Matt Bevin had enough tea party craziness in him to topple Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and nuke himself in the general election, this should
restore your faith (emphasis added):
QUESTION: The programs that put the “big” in big government are Medicare and Social Security. What specifically would you do about them? Raise the age of eligibility?
BEVIN: There has to be fiscal responsibility applied. There has to be common sense. These programs are going broke. They are bankrupt. Look at the requirements for eligibility on two fronts – both in terms of means- testing if it comes to that, but more critically and more importantly, look at the demographics.
When these programs were created, the recipients on average lived a few years beyond the point at which they were eligible. Now they’re living as long as half their lives after the point that they become eligible – decades and decades. This is what’s making it unsustainable.
Whether it’s 2, 3, 5, 7 years for people who have yet to join the program, the fact is we need to start moving in a different direction and we have to start now. I don’t believe in cutting for those who are now receiving.
So Bevin tries to cover his behind by saying he doesn't want to cut benefits for people who are currently receiving Social Security, but he wants to raise the retirement age and cut benefits for everyone else, and he says he wants to do it because he believes Social Security and Medicare "are bankrupt" in part because he believes many beneficiaries are living "half their lives" after becoming eligible.
But just because Bevin believes those things doesn't make them true: neither Social Security nor Medicare are bankrupt and only a handful of people ever reach the age of 98 or 100, the age at which they'd have spent half their lives benefits from Medicare or Social Security, and even those people would still have spent more of their lives in the workforce.
To the extent there are any long-term fiscal challenges, they have to with Medicare and the rate of increase in the cost of health care, and given that Medicare costs grow more slowly than private insurance, raising the retirement age would be the exact wrong way to go.
All that being said, the fact that Bevin's ideas are both bad and unpopular with the public at large isn't necessarily a liability in the Republican primary. In fact, they're probably pretty helpful. Just like Christine O'Donnell and Richard Mourdock and Ken Buck and Sharron Angle and Todd Akin before him, Matt Bevin just might be extreme enough to win.