Despite promises, Congress shuns Social Security reform

Washington Bureau Chief FRITZ E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times
published October 21, 2002

WASHINGTON -- Consider these three events:

-- Former Rep. Barbara Kennelly sends letters to seniors across the country, warning of an impending crisis in the congressional debate on Social Security.

-- An ad on New Hampshire television shows Rep. John Sununu wearing sunglasses and a fake beard. "There's a politician in New Hampshire who's hiding something," it says. ". . . He wants to privatize Social Security."

-- The Senate Finance Committee holds a hearing on Social Security just days before the Congress is scheduled to adjourn for the election.

If you were to draw a conclusion, you'd probably think Congress has been hard at work developing a plan to reform the Social Security system. But you would be wrong. The 107th Congress never took even the first, tentative steps toward drafting meaningful legislation to fix the government's program for retirees and the disabled.

Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans kept the promise they made in the 2000 election to tackle the problem. After President Bush's Social Security commission made its controversial report last year, Republicans stopped talking about it because polls showed the proposal to create private accounts was not popular. Democrats, who prefer to fix the funding without altering benefits, were happy to maintain the status quo.

As Robert Bixby of the Concord Coalition says, Congress has effectively decided to solve the looming shortfall in Social Security with the "do-nothing plan."

Social Security is becoming one of those perennial issues that gets dusted off during every congressional and presidential election and then put back into the closet for the next two years. And every time that happens the debate seems to become more polarized and the issue more resistant to an eventual compromise.

This election season, because there were no recorded votes on the Social Security issue during the congressional session, several interest groups on both sides of the issue have found a new way to exaggerate the differences between the Republicans and Democrats.

On one side is a new nonprofit group known as Social Security Choice.org, which was created by a coalition of conservative Republican organizations that want to privatize Social Security. Because the word "privatization" stirs a negative reaction, they -- much like the abortion rights lobby -- have chosen the ambiguous word "choice" to muddle the debate just a little more.

After the Choice group persuaded several dozen lawmakers to sign a petition favoring individual accounts within the Social Security program, the Democrats responded by circulating their own petition for lawmakers who oppose privatization. Their petition is being promoted by the Campaign for America's Future, another nonprofit group that has been responsible for many of the campaign commercials that scare elderly voters into thinking their retirement income is in jeopardy.

So instead of actually working on a real plan that would fix the Social Security system, our lawmakers are signing petitions. And these petitions will lock members of Congress into political positions that will be very hard for them to abandon if there is ever an opportunity to vote for a genuine compromise.

Meanwhile, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., has been keeping a file of all the outrageous campaign television ads that have been aired this election season about Social Security. Perhaps the most outrageous one he found accused a pro-privatization candidate of wanting to invest Social Security funds in companies such as Enron and WorldCom.

Even amid all of this campaign noise, there are still a few sane voices calling for a reasonable debate. Although Andrew Biggs of the CATO Institute is an enthusiastic proponent of private accounts, he realizes his side might have to compromise for the good of the nation's elderly.

"The best ways to defeat (the privatization proposal) is to put forth a better one," Biggs told the Senate Finance Committee. "Once viable alternatives for account-based plans are put forward, the political and legislative processes can produce choices and compromises between these outlooks and progress toward strengthening Social Security can be made."

Bixby questions why more people are not challenging Congress to work toward a realistic solution. "What's remarkable," he says, "is not that reform plans engender so much heated debate, but that the do-nothing plan engenders so little outrage."

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