And so it begins. The winners of Tuesday’s primary hardly had time to draw a second breath before state Democratic chair Pat Waak was declaring on Colorado Public Radio that the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate was gunning for seniors’ pensions and medical care.
Ken Buck is an extremist, you see, who “wants to do away with Social Security and Medicare,” according to Waak.
I’m not sure why a Democratic chief would bother with such a mundane pronouncement. Isn’t it well known that all Republicans, if given the chance, would throw the elderly into the street, preferably shoeless and during a blizzard? Voters have been warned about their heartlessness for years. Who could have missed the bulletin?
Funny thing, though: Entitlement programs seem to grow almost as fast when Republicans are in charge as when Democrats rule the roost. Go figure.
Buck, the Weld County prosecutor, wants to repeal Obamacare but not Medicare. And he seems willing to hike the retirement age for Social Security for younger workers as a way to reduce its unfunded liability. He’s said so many times.
But he also once said, in an apparent response on the campaign trail to a query about Social Security, that while he didn’t “know whether it’s constitutional or not, it is certainly a horrible policy. The idea that the federal government should be running health care or retirement or any of those programs is fundamentally against what I believe. And that is that the private sector runs programs like that far better.”
The “constitutional” bit is ludicrous — a seeming attempt to placate one of those “dumbass” questioners (to adopt Buck’s own memorable term) that afflict campaign stops. But the rest of the statement, if clumsy, speaks to an undeniable truth. If private pension executives mismanaged their funds as badly as Social Security, they’d face prison terms — because they’re simply not allowed to spend contributions as soon as they’re collected while maintaining an accounting fiction of a huge trust fund.
Buck’s lapse, which he later repudiated, will nevertheless be replayed over and over in an attempt to frighten voters. What actually ought to frighten them is the inability of politicians to engage in any debate about entitlements that doesn’t amount to fear-mongering.
Defeated Republican candidate Jane Norton had advocated what was easily the most thoroughgoing set of Social Security reforms voters heard, addressing the retirement age, indexing of benefits and more. Yet she no doubt would have been savaged by Democrats for her courage had she prevailed.
Ironically, the Democratic candidates couldn’t refrain from even bashing each other on Social Security, with Michael Bennet falsely accusing Andrew Romanoff of supporting privatization while an independent group denounced Bennet for opposing a totally unwarranted “emergency” payment to seniors last year of $250.
The preferred Democratic method for resolving Social Security’s unfunded liability is to lift the cap on earnings exposed to the tax. But whether Democrats like it or not, the key to shrinking the federal government’s long-term structural deficit — which is monumental, and to which Social Security contributes — is to slow the trajectory of entitlement spending.
You can’t eliminate the deficit solely by raising taxes without crippling the economy. So if you aren’t willing to take the fairly obvious step of adjusting spending on Social Security through, say, a slight tweak in how it is indexed, why on Earth should voters take you seriously on spending at all?
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
