Rick Perry isn’t out of the woods yet with his clumsy pronouncements on Social Security, and he may never hack his way free. The Texas governor may have to run as the presidential candidate whom no one takes too seriously on the issue — except perhaps those who are as uninformed as he apparently was when he announced his candidacy.
He’ll be like Mitt Romney on Obamacare: not entirely credible.
What a missed opportunity for the Republican front-runner. Never before has Social Security’s status as the untouchable third rail of American politics — a subject that elected officials simply couldn’t talk honestly about — been so ripe for challenge. Frightened by unfathomable federal deficits and debt, many voters are prepared to admit that entitlements — even red, white and blue Social Security — cannot be exempt from reform.
Since Democrats by and large seem determined to bolster Social Security’s health mainly by lifting the cap on taxable earnings, it’s up to Republicans to push for a more responsible plan — one that doesn’t simply expect working Americans to shoulder the burden of a fast-growing class of retirees.
But suggesting Social Security is unconstitutional and that it might be shoved down to the states, as Perry did in his book “Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington,” is akin to lighting matches at a gas pump. Declaring, as he did in a debate on Sept. 7, “It is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years old today, you’re paying into a program that’s going to be there,” is inviting backlash. So is insisting that the program has been a “failure by any measure.”
The program is going to be there for our kids, in some form or another. And it has not been a failure by every measure. But if nothing is done and the trust fund runs dry in the mid-2030s, as projected, benefit payments will in fact take an overnight hit of roughly 22 percent.
Sitting on our hands before that sobering prospect would be reckless and foolish.
In Monday’s debate, Perry claimed “no one’s had the courage to stand up and say, ‘Here is how we’re going to reform it.’ ” Then he conveniently neglected to offer a single specific about how he’d reform it — while taking pains to reassure everyone in or near retirement that they’d be exempt from whatever he proposes.
How much courage does it really take to look people in the eye and say that whatever you do, you’ll be sure to spare them from any unpleasantness?
Social Security’s funding shortfall is far more manageable than the explosive growth of federal health care programs, which will eat up an additional 3 or 4 percent of GDP over the next two decades, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But fixing Social Security nevertheless involves a stark choice: major tax hikes during their working lives for the younger generation or changes in the benefit formula, or a combination of the two.
Before Perry sounds off again on Social Security, someone might want to tell him that under the current formula, future retirees will typically enjoy bigger pensions, in constant dollars, than retirees do today because initial benefits are indexed to wage growth rather than inflation.
In other words, if we merely slowed the growth in benefits for, say, everyone but the poorest recipients, as the co-chairs of the president’s fiscal commission suggested last year, we’d reap significant savings and yet still ensure that future retirees receive no less than today’s.
Offering such a sensible plan naturally earned Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the chairs of the fiscal commission, furious abuse from the likes of AARP, but they weathered the assault with their reputations intact because they knew what they were talking about.
Too bad we can’t yet say as much about the Texas governor.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Read his blog at .
