On Fox News Sunday, anchor Chris Wallace asked Florida U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio, a Republican, if he still stood behind a statement he had made on the program a month earlier that he would support Social Security benefit cuts for people under the age of 55.
Rubio confirmed that he did, and went on to add that he believed all serious observers agreed that benefits would need to be cut.
We disagree, but more about that in a minute.
If we lived in a “post-partisan” political world, where ideas could be proposed and discussed in an intelligent manner, then we could have a rational discussion about benefits cuts.
But Washington’s political divisiveness has become a national embarrassment, with name calling, and scoldings and massive pieces of legislation being forced through without one single vote from the minority party.
That is not an environment where an elected official wants to discuss Social Security benefits cuts. Just ask President George W. Bush.
Bush came to Washington having campaigned on reforming Social Security, which included creating personal retirement accounts. And he tried to do it—right after he and the Republicans pushed through the Medicare Prescription Drug Act, albeit with some Democratic support.
Rather than embracing the Social Security reform proposal developed by IPI’s Peter Ferrara (and embraced by many in the free-market policy world) that created personal accounts and paid off Social Security’s long-term liabilities without cutting benefits, the Bush administration was willing to consider benefit cuts for future retirees.
The result was both a policy and political disaster.
Critics immediately savaged Bush for “cutting benefits.” AARP, which didn’t seem to mind a $500 billion-plus cut to Medicare in the recent health care reform legislation, was screaming at the top of its lungs then.
Social Security could have been transformed into a far better system, creating true savings and wealth for average American workers, and eliminating the enormous liability hanging over the head of the federal government (and thus American taxpayers).
Ferrara and other IPI policy experts repeatedly tried to get the Bush administration to reconsider its position. But the hierarchy attacked IPI’s plan instead, and what ultimately got cut wasn’t Social Security benefits, but the possibility of fixing Social Security once and for all.