Social Security enters fray
Published 9:00 pm Sunday, November 30, 2003
CRAWFORD, Texas — President Bush is completing plans to campaign next year for a restructuring of Social Security, a potentially divisive drive that he believes is "a winning issue" for Republicans — and for his own legacy.
Even as lawmakers and the president twisted arms to reach agreement on expanding Medicare and providing seniors with prescription drug coverage, White House aides were working with allies on Capitol Hill to fine-tune a strategy on Social Security.
The United States’ bedrock social insurance program since its enactment in 1935, Social Security is funded by a payroll tax that is slated to pay for $470 billion in retirement benefits this year to more than 46 million elderly and disabled Americans. Bush’s goal of allowing workers to divert some of those payroll taxes into private investment accounts faces even more political obstacles than the just-passed Medicare legislation.
"This issue scares older Americans more than the bill that just passed," said Robert Blendon, a Harvard University analyst who specializes in entitlement programs. "This is more powerful, more threatening."
But Bush may enjoy advantages over predecessors who tried to revamp Social Security. His success in overseeing change in Medicare could give weight to his 2000 campaign claim of being a "reformer with results." And the sense of anxiety over Social Security is mounting as the day of the program’s inability to pay promised benefits — now estimated to occur in about 2039 — draws closer.
When Bush established the Social Security commission in May 2001, he laid out six "guiding principles" that included no changes for retirees or near-retirees regardless of the commission’s recommendations, no increase in the payroll tax and the creation of individually controlled, voluntary personal retirement accounts, which dovetails with the president’s vision of an "ownership society."
In October 2002, the panel produced an array of options, including the controversial private investment accounts, that the commissioners predicted would make Social Security solvent and permanently sustainable.
But as the Medicare debate in the Senate suggested, there is unlikely to be any such let-up in the discussions over Social Security. As Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., charged during his unsuccessful filibuster against the GOP-written Medicare bill: "Hold on to your hat. Today, Medicare. Tomorrow, Social Security."
