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Social Security Woes? What Social Security Woes?

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By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: November 20, 2007

Lately, Sen. Barack Obama has been saying that major action is needed to avert what he keeps calling a "crisis" in Social Security. Progressives who fought hard and successfully against the Bush administration's attempt to panic America into privatizing the New Deal's crown jewel are outraged, and rightly so.

But Obama's Social Security mistake was, in fact, exactly what you'd expect from a candidate who promises to transcend partisanship in an age when that's neither possible nor desirable.

Inside the Beltway, doomsaying about Social Security - declaring that the program as we know it can't survive the onslaught of retiring baby boomers - is regarded as a sort of badge of seriousness, a way of showing how statesmanlike and tough-minded you are.

But the "everyone" who knows that Social Security is doomed doesn't include anyone who actually understands the numbers. In fact, the whole Beltway obsession with the fiscal burden of an aging population is misguided.

As Peter Orszag, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, put it in a recent article: "The long-term fiscal condition of the United States has been largely misdiagnosed. Despite all the attention paid to demographic challenges, such as the coming retirement of the baby-boom generation, our country's financial health will in fact be determined primarily by the growth rate of per capita health care costs."

How has conventional wisdom gotten this so wrong? Well, in large part it's the result of decades of scare-mongering about Social Security's future from conservative ideologues, whose ultimate goal is to undermine the program.

Thus, in 2005, the Bush administration tried to push through a combination of privatization and benefit cuts that would, over time, have reduced Social Security to nothing but a giant 401(k). The administration claimed that this was necessary to save the program, which officials insisted was "heading toward an iceberg."

Fortunately, the scare tactics failed. Democrats in Congress stood their ground; progressive analysts debunked, one after another, the phony arguments of the privatizers; and the public made it clear that it wants to preserve a basic safety net for retired Americans.

That should have been that. But in October, The Washington Post published an editorial castigating Sen. Hillary Clinton for not being panicky about Social Security.

Which brings us back to Obama. Why would he, in effect, play along with this new round of scare-mongering and devalue one of the great progressive victories of the Bush years?

Obama wanted a way to distinguish himself from Hillary Clinton - and for Obama, who has said that the reason "we can't tackle the big problems that demand solutions" is that "politics has become so bitter and partisan," joining in the attack on Clinton's Social Security position must have seemed like a golden opportunity to sound forceful yet bipartisan.

We all wish that American politics weren't so bitter and partisan. But if you try to find common ground where none exists, you end up being played for a fool. And that's what has just happened to Obama.

Paul Krugman is a columnist for The New York Times.

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