The Heritage Foundation seems to think it might be:
With Congress on holiday and the President out of town, one usually hears little about policy efforts during the August doldrums. When a midterm election is approaching, politicians don’t like to rock the boat by discussing potentially divisive issues. However, the Washington Post reports that the Bush administration has begun to approach Members of Congress about forming a new bipartisan effort to tackle entitlement spending:
The Bush administration has begun sounding out lawmakers and other key figures about mounting a new bipartisan effort to rein in the costs of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security after the midterm elections, according to officials in the administration and on Capitol Hill.
No specific plan has been advanced, and administration officials are proceeding gingerly given the political debacle that beset the White House last year when President Bush promoted a plan to create private accounts in the Social Security program. But they have been sending strong signals in recent weeks that they want to try something again after the elections in November.
When Bush nominated Henry Paulson to run the Department of the Treasury, it was difficult to tell whether he meant to make a real effort at reducing the runaway spending projected for entitlements. Paulson made his preferences known from the start, and in his maiden speech pointedly noted his motivation in accepting the position sprang from the opportunity to make a difference in this area.
What people say/What people do - always the most important thing to pay attention to in politics. Here in our GOP summer of discontent, it is rather bold for someone at the White House to be proposing a fresh look at entitlement reform for 2007 unless a guy with the initials "KR" is mighty confident of the November result.
That aside: entitlement reform (especially Social Security) is an issue we cannot afford to kick down the road. In spite of liberal/left attempts to obscure the issue, the plain fact of the matter is that our entitlements - like all welfare-State entitlements all around the world - are driving us towards national bankruptcy. Not in the sense that someone will foreclose on the United States, but in the sense that the government, unable to raise taxes to cover the shortfall, will eventually have to repudiate at least a substantial portion of its obligations to the ill and elderly. There's no two ways about it: there isn't enough money, using our current system, to provide for everyone who is promised benefits. Something's gotta give.
What should give is the archaic, leftwing notion that our Fairy Government-Mother shall always take care of us - such schemes as Social Security only worked in the atypical demographics of the western world from about 1850 until 1950: a massive excess of births over deaths, thus providing a very large pool of young workers to pay for retiree benefits. That bit of demographics doesn't apply anymore - we are in a downward population spiral, though the first affects of this (a net loss in world population) won't kick in for another half century or so. Fewer people means that you must have a mechanism to increase wealth rather than just transfer it from the many to the few. The only known mechanism for creating this sort of wealth is via private investment in the private economy. In other words, our only hope is to privatise Social Security.
I hope this is pushed - regardless of election results. Other than the War on Terrorism, this is the most vital and dangerous issue we face over the next 25 years.
Posted by Mark Noonan at August 15, 2006 06:48 AM
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