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There are two things going on in Jane Hamsher's post on the "fiscal summit." The first is a show of thundering opposition to benefit cuts in Social Security. That's a good thing. Progressives should draw bright lines. The second, though, is an effort to read the tea leaves to suggest that the Obama administration has a secret plan to cut Social Security benefits. That makes rather less sense. The source of Jane's claim seems to be in this paragraph from Ben Smith's interview with Orszag:
Orszag’s long-running project – something that has made him the Left’s favorite Cabinet member – has been replacing talk of an “entitlement crisis” with his argument that Social Security requires only modest tax hikes and benefit cuts, while Medicare and Medicaid have much more dramatic fiscal woes.Hamsher focuses on the bolded portion. But that gets the importance of the quote backwards. The point of Orszag's argument is not how you fix Social Security. It's to stop talking about an entitlement crisis. To read a clearer exposition of this argument, see this old Paul Krugman post. "Social Security fades to insignificance in any realistic discussion of entitlements problems," he says. "Medicare’s unfunded liabilities, as estimated in the trustees’ reports, are seven times those of Social Security. The unfunded liabilities of Medicare Part D alone are twice those of Social Security. If you’re seriously worried about America’s long-run fiscal prospects, then, you should talk a lot about the general fund deficit and the problem of rising health care costs, and hardly at all about Social Security. But that’s not how it works in DC these days."That, basically, has been Orszag's project: Talk a lot about the health care crisis and longer-term problems in the budget and get people to stop talking about an illusory crisis in a made-up program called socialsecurityandmedicareandmedicaid. Because what Orszag and Krugman both realize is that Social Security's unfunded liabilities only look like the sort of problem you need to "fix" if you're mixing it in with Medicare's unfunded liabilities. If there's an "entitlements problem" that requires an "entitlements commission" then that will cut Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. If there's no "entitlements problem" and instead a health reform problem and some small questions about a politically electric program, then what you get is health reform -- which is also a way to slow Medicaid and Medicare growth without resorting to cuts -- and an end to the fear-mongering on Social Security. Orszag is one of the good guys here.
