Somewhere, Pete Peterson is having a good day, having successfully sold the snake oil that Social Security is on the verge of collapse to the American populace. From the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll:
The good news is in the solutions, that is, good news if our policy makers ever start listening to public opinion again:
Here's Ezra, and "how to lift the debt ceiling and save Social Security in one easy step."
According to the survey, more than 80 percent of Americans believe the system is in crisis. And, in a reversal of recent results on this issue, Republicans are more trusted to handle it than Democrats: 44 percent of respondents favored the GOP, while only 42 percent favored President Obama (this is primarily due to Democrats trusting Obama at a low rate on this issue). But when it came to solutions, most cuts were opposed by a majority of Americans. Almost 60 percent were against raising the retirement age and almost 70 percent were against cutting scheduled benefits. The only fix that garnered majority support was lifting the payroll-tax cap so that all income, rather than just the first $107,000, got taxed. That’s a reform, I’m confident to say, that the Senate’s liberals would have less trouble swallowing, and according to the Congressional Budget Office, it would wipe out virtually all of Social Security’s shortfall.
So if this is just about balancing Social Security’s books, it shouldn’t be too difficult. We can pass the reform and raise the debt ceiling with no problem. Huzzah! On the other hand, if we’re in one of those conversations where we’re pretending to talk about balancing the country’s books but we’re actually only talking about “cutting spending” and revenues are off the table, well, that’ll be harder.
Of course it's not really about balancing Social Security's books, for most Republicans and too many Democrats. It's about diverting as much as possible to Wall Street, and turning what's left into a welfare program, which would then be easier to kill. If it were just about making Social Security solvent for the next three quarters of a century, it'd be easy.
It's made much, much easier by having the public opinion on your side. Which it is. So when do we start talking about revenues?