Rigid Adherence to Ideology

In an editorial this morning the Bee wrote (about dealing with the issues surrounding Social Security) "This rigid adherence to ideology over pragmatism has resulted in a failure to craft real, bipartisan solutions to social security's problems." That's correct but it is not just the Bush administration (who the Bee criticizes) that is guilty of the sin.

Secretary Paulsen, on the release of the actuarial review of the system commented ""The Social Security program is financially unsustainable and requires reform...[and] the Medicare program poses a far greater financial challenge than Social Security." There sure is not anything rigid or ideological there.

The Bee's beef with the Administration is that it continues to argue for privatization of the system. The Administration has also explored something called progressive indexing as well as other ideas which would reduce the rate of growth for benefits. Both sets of proposals have been tried in other countries. Places as diverse as New Zealand and Chile have adopted privatization, with excellent results. The benefits of the change are manyfold. The country enjoys an increase in saving which contributes to a much more vigorous capital pool. The workers now have some choices among alternatives. And their return on their investments are considerably higher. (The numbers in this case are stunning for all workers.) In those countries where privatization has been adopted there is always a government run option - but most workers understand the truly lousy deal that the current one size fits all actually offers. All those benefits sound like something worth exploring. But the Bee and the democrats in congress refuse to even explore the idea.

Rigid adherence to ideology was a problem with one issue where the Administration got sucked in. That was the Medicare prescription drug benefit, which was adopted because of a rigid ideology of entitlement. The Social Security system will not go into actual insolvency for a while (depends on which actuary you listen to as to when) but Medicare is a looming disaster because of the huge increase that our national "leaders" agreed to just a couple of years ago.