Read This

The one article you should read this week is from The New Republic. The most telling paragraph is this [emphasis mine]:

What was clarified at those events has, alas, been obscured in Washington. The consensus among the capital's chattering classes holds that the Social Security debate primarily concerns the program's solvency. Therefore, the questions center around political courage, and the greatest threat is that the parties will not agree on a solution. This consensus is wrong in every particular. In truth, the debate is fundamentally ideological. It does not lend itself to compromise. Despite conservatives' insistence that Social Security faces a "crisis," in reality, the fiscal threat is distant and manageable, while the political threat is immediate and dire. It follows from all this that those who believe in Social Security should make it their highest priority to drive a stake through privatization.

I'm not a big fan of TNR generally, but this is an excellent piece that covers most of the salient points about Social Security that I've covered here and more.

It debunks most of the common memes that George W. Bush and the champions of privatization have been spewing for months. As I've said all along, their ultimate goal is total phase-out, not "strengthening" Social Security.

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