The way to read William Greider's assault on Pete Peterson and his merry band of entitlement cutters is as a warning shot in advance of Monday's "fiscal responsibility summit," which Greider says "could set the trap" for deep cuts in entitlement spending. "People everywhere," exhorts Greider, "raise a mighty din!" I'm all for din-raising, but I'm not sure it's necessary. Monday's fiscal reform summit, which has caused a lot of heartburn in progressive circles, is not, according to sources in the administration, going to actually upset them. "The most likely outcome at this point," says one senior administration official, "is that we focus on health care, given that it's the key to our fiscal future." The administration does not think about the "entitlement question." Rather, there are two sets of programs. One is Social Security. There's a tendency for post-Bush progressives to quake when Social Security's finances are called into question. But the Obama administration includes two of the economists most closely associated with the effort to beat back Social Security privatization (others were Dean Baker, Brad DeLong, and Paul Krugman). Peter Orszag, now head of OMB but then at Brookings, and Jason Furman, the staff economist for the National Economic Council but then allied with the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, both helped craft and coordinate the response to Bush's proposal, and were central to the effort to warn moderate Democrats off of the President's plan. There is no replay of Bush's crisis-mongering the offing. No commission headed by Kent Conrad with a mandate to cut the program. Any fixes would look more along the lines of, well, the Orszag-Diamond proposal -- which most liberal embraced as the responsible alternative in 2005 -- than the Pete Peterson plan. And it would be mindful of the articles Furman wrote defending Social Security, like this CBPP brief offering 10 facts central to understanding the program. But none of that is likely to happen in the near term. The simple fact is that the administration is not focused on Social Security. "Health care," says one adviser, "is simply mathematically bigger." As Orszag said to Ben Smith today, “Social Security faces an actuarial deficit over the next 75-100 years. In the past I’ve resisted the term ‘crisis’ to describe that kind of situation,” he said. “This is not quantitatively as important as getting health care done.” You'll notice that Orszag says "health care," not "Medicaid and Medicare." The Obama administration believes that the entitlement problem is a health care entitlement problem, and the health care entitlement problem is a health care system problem. And so the focus now is on health care reform: The fiscal responsibility summit will be used, in part, to make this argument. In Obama's Washington, a plan to cut Social Security is no longer enough to qualify you as "fiscally responsible." You need an answer to the Medicare and Medicaid questions, which means you need an answer to the health care system. We will see the beginnings of the White House's answer -- an answer that has required a series of decisions by President Obama himself -- when the budget emerges next Thursday. That, and not Monday's summit, is where the nature of the administration's commitment to fiscal responsibility will come clear.
