That's something of a problem for a crop of ultra-conservative Republican candidates, including Kentucky's Rand Paul and Pennsylvania's Pat Toomey, who is vying with Congressman Joe Sestak for the Keystone State's open Senate seat. Toomey had been a staunch advocate of privatization; all along, he favored a Bush-like plan allowing younger workers to divert a chunk of their payroll taxes to privately managed retirement accounts. But now he claims, "I've never said I favor privatizing Social Security."
So what does "privatization" mean, exactly? At its most extreme, privatization is simply ending Social Security and returning the responsibility of saving for retirement to individuals; as we saw before the advent of social-insurance programs, this tack is generally untenable if you want to maintain a robust economy and limit poverty, especially among the elderly. Since Republicans aren't proposing ending Social Security all at once, they claim that the term privatization is, as Toomey puts it, "an intentionally misleading term."
The semantic debate is pretty ironic coming from a party that happily assails President Obama's center-left agenda as "socialism." But still, "privatization" is an accurate term -- that it is freighted with negative political baggage doesn't make it incorrect. Once you start diverting money from public social insurance into private accounts, privatization is occurring, to the detriment of the broader solvency of the program.
Many Americans aren't comfortable with that and would like to see a Social Security reform agenda that focuses on strengthening the best aspects of the program in the long term, not radically reshaping it to pump more money into the financial sector. Democrats like to rhetorically ask what would happen had Bush's 2005 privatization plan become reality just before the financial crisis; we would have seen more retirements damaged and likely a larger bubble to pop.
Toomey's desire to sidestep the consequences of his Social Security agenda is a sign that one of the most rock-ribbed conservatives understands the radical nature of his proposition; reaching out to moderates is a part of every good general election plan, but I can't help but wonder what 2005-era Club for Growth President Pat Toomey would have said about rhetoric like that during his inquisition of moderate Republicans.
-- Tim Fernholz