I've seen people here and elsewhere confidently predict that no one, neither President Obama nor the GOP, would dare go after Social Security. It's the Third Rail, they say, arguing that the program's popularity will protect it. But as usual, there's a political way around a political problem. Those who want to cut Social Security will say they're "reforming" it or "modernizing it" or even making it "more progressive."
The Center for American Progress, the liberal-leaning group with strong ties to the Administration, is out witha plan to "modernize" Social Security, and it sounds good.
A Progressive Approach to Strengthening Social Security
But when you go past the title, you see that what they're actually proposing includes substantial benefit cuts. There's this, for example:
Gradually phase in progressive changes to benefit the formula. The benefit amount for the bottom 67 percent of income earners will not change under this proposal. The initial benefit amount for the top one-third of income earners will grow more slowly than is currently the case. These changes in the benefit formula will be gradually phased.
Progressive? They call it "progressive" because it will affect only the top one-third of income earners. But the top third of benefit earners includes millions of middle class people. Such a change would not only hurt them; it would chip away at the program's universality, the linchpin of its strength.
The language used to propose cuts is always benign, even soothing. It has to be. Here's the author of CAP's plan explaining why it's necessary.
Conservative plans to dismantle Social Security represent a clear and present danger, but another lesser danger is to reject any calls for updating the program. Progressive governance requires us to modernize this program to provide a strong and fiscally sustainable Social Security system to meet the economic challenges of our age. This is not the political fad of the moment, but an economic imperative for each and every generation of Americans.
Updating. Modernizing. What could go wrong?
This is how President Obama will talk if he chooses to support cuts in Social Security. It's how he talked when as as Senator he headlined the launch of Robert Rubin's Hamilton Project.
We all know that the coming baby boomers’ retirement will only add to the challenges that we face in this new era. Unfortunately, while the world has changed around us, Washington has been remarkably slow to adapt twenty-first century solutions for a twenty-first century economy. As so many of us have seen, both sides of the political spectrum have tended to cling to outdated policies and tired ideologies instead of coalescing around what actually works.
For those on the left, and I include myself in that category, too many of us have been interested in defending programs the way they were written in 1938, believing that if we admit the need to modernize these programs to fit changing times, then the other side will use those acknowledgements to destroy them altogether.
Beware any and all attempts to "improve" Social Security.