The president takes a lot of heat from the liberal blogs for all the mumbo-jumbo he puts on offer, but he wouldn’t bother unless there were all these people out there eager to lap it up. Case in point, today’s witless Washington Post editorial that opens with the astounding observation that “For the past three months Democrats have declined to engage in a debate over Social Security.”
Now I’m not sure where Fred Hiatt lives, but here on the planet earth Democrats have very much been engaged in a debate over Social Security. There’s a debate on about whether we should have Social Security or whether it should be phased-out and replaced with something radically different. The White House initiated this debate by proposing that we get rid of Social Security, and Democrats have engaged by saying we should keep it. So far, Democrats are winning this debate.
On Planet Hiatt there’s some other debate taking place about how we should phase Social Security out and what, exactly, we should replace it with. These can be interesting debates. Reason is a stylish and witty libertarian magazine where several of my friends work. As libertarians, they take it for granted that we should get rid of Social Security. Consequently, they hosted a debate in their pages between James “Dow 36,000” Glassman and Tyler Cowen, a very sharp libertarian economist. Naturally enough, the credibility-deprived hack endorsed something very much like the president’s proposal. Cowen prefers to just radically reduce benefits and leave things at that. The debate’s worth reading. Nevertheless, this is a whole other debate from the one the country is having right now, which is about whether or not Social Security should be saved. That’s the debate Democrats need to be — and are — engaged in right now. They have no business engaging in the other debate. Anyone who’s genuinely confused as to how a pro-Social Security administration might make the numbers add up can look at any number of plans liberal wonks have put together. But those internecine debates within the Social Security faction are, at the moment, every bit as irrelevant as the internecine debates within the phase out faction. Right now, the debate is about phase out pure and simple. Bush, and the Post, are for it. Democrats are against it.
