Special Report

In the wake of his 2004 victory, President Bush seems poised to challenge the axiom that Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Democratic Party leaders will be making a very serious mistake if they believe that Americans will rush to the barricades to fight the president’s privatization proposals. Blocking his radical attack […]

The art of building consensus out of the “vague and confusing medley” of individual opinions, Walter Lippmann wrote in The Phantom Public, consists in narrowing issues to a few simplified alternatives that can be reduced to “symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas.” It would be hard to go any […]

Amid the clatter over “saving” Social Security, it’s instructive to look back 22 years — to a time when an imperiled program was saved by a true bipartisan compromise. Then, as now, a newly emboldened GOP was rewriting the agenda in Washington. But then, unlike now, each side sacrificed for long-term gain. As the 1980s […]

The epic social security battle of 2005 will boil down to two questions: which side will do a more effective job getting its message out to voters, and which party can enforce the tighter discipline in Congress. Seemingly, the circumstances favor the Republicans, who have the bully pulpit of the White House, almost infinite financial […]

The word from President Bush and his minions is that Social Security is on its last legs, facing imminent danger of bankruptcy. Fortunately, Bush is prepared to rescue this antiquated program by offering workers the opportunity to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in private accounts. He would like us to believe that […]

President Bush claims the 2004 election gave him a mandate to pursue his No. 1 second-term priority, the partial privatization of Social Security. But the voters don’t think so. Only 35 percent of Americans think Bush has a mandate “to allow workers to invest some of their Social Security taxes in the stock market,” while […]

Why does the United States and every other developed nation have a system of social-insurance pensions? The simple answer is that social insurance is intended to ensure basic income to those no longer able to work. These include the elderly, the disabled, orphans, and widows and widowers with small children. “Ensure” means that incomes must […]

For nearly three-quarters of a century, Americans have taken Social Security for granted. Now we had better learn how it works, what it has done, and what the true facts are regarding its future — or else we are going to lose it. Superficially, Social Security resembles traditional employer pensions: Americans pay into the system […]

When it comes to election systems, the United States isn’t all Floridas and Ohios. There are, in fact, a number of states that tend to run their elections well, through trusted systems and voter-friendly procedures. They don’t grab the attention of journalists and reformers precisely because they rarely produce newsworthy controversies and snafus. Reform experts […]

For election officials in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, November 2 had passed with merciful ease. The balloting was deemed an administrative success — until two days later, that is, when election workers noticed a mathematical oddity: As they canvassed more votes, the tallies in certain races had decreased. After some hand-wringing, election officials discovered that the […]