Entitlement Deja Vu

During the State of the Union, Democrats cheered the fact nothing was done to save Social Security. But by announcing yet another bipartisan commission, is President Bush rewarding their irresponsibility?

'Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security," the president noted in his address to a joint session of Congress, and Democrats promptly took the cue and gave themselves a standing ovation for doing nothing.

It was a scene that must have put a smile on the face of every Republican campaign consultant in America, because that footage is sure to be used against Democrats in TV commercials during this year's congressional campaigns.

Standing in the way of President Bush's bold reform of Social Security is nothing to be proud of.
His proposal would have taken some of the control and ownership over the money collected in taxes for retirement away from greedy government and given it to individuals through personal retirement accounts.

It would also have solved Social Security's solvency crisis by controlling the growth of benefits.

On its present course, Social Security will start to lose money in 2017 and by 2041 will go bankrupt. The Social Security trustees last year warned that delaying reform of Social Security for just one year costs $600 billion.

But has the president himself become discouraged? More than 1,100 words of last year's State of the Union were devoted to Social Security. This year, Social Security and other entitlement programs merited barely 200.

Considering that the president reportedly wanted a "visionary" speech to make before Congress, that's short shrift for what is probably his most inspired domestic initiative.

In the summer, the president talked all the time about his vision of an "ownership society"; in recent months he's barely mentioned it. And the word "ownership" appeared not once in this year's State of the Union.

Instead, Bush called for the establishment of a commission to study entitlement spending, to be composed of members of Congress from both parties. It sounds like the classic political punt: If you can't get what you'd like, hand the ball over to the Washington establishment and hope for the best.

The bipartisan commission that recently spent endless months studying tax reform was a huge disappointment. The panel delivered nothing capable of capturing the imagination of the public, and there's little chance it will lead to overhauling the tax code in favor of savings and investment.

Entitlement spending is indeed out of control. Medicare is hemorrhaging cash, and its costs are expected to overtake Social Security's within two decades. Even the maestro, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, was skittish about tackling Medicare reform.

"I'm fearful we would be restructuring an obsolete model and have to come back and undo it," he told Congress last year.

He should know. The much-congratulated Greenspan Commission in 1983 swept Social Security under the rug, claiming to have shored up the program for 75 years via tax increases. Today we're faced with undoing the Greenspan "reform."

Entitlement spending has been studied to death. We all know the solution: deep spending cuts and a shift from government control to individual responsibility.

Commission or no commission, that won't happen without the president talking it up — far and wide and often.