The Washington Post just won't give it a rest. Just after a new Congress was elected, in part in response to President Bush's effort to privatize Social Security, the Post editorializes that it is now a great time to "reform" Social Security. Columnist Sebastian Mallaby also threw in another diatribe for good measure. The Post is more honest than usual in today's column, noting that the program is solvent for the next 35 years according to President Bush's Social Security Trustees (40 years according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office) and that the projected explosion in health care costs implies that Medicare is a much bigger problem, but then argues that workers need time to plan for their retirement. While time for planning is great, one might think that 20 years is plenty. Furthermore, the Post's editorialists were unconcerned about the impact that the impending collapse of a stock market bubble would have on people's retirement plans in the late 90s and they also seem unconcerned about the impending collapse of the housing bubble at the moment. I continue to adhere to the old-fashioned view that we should focus on big and immediate problems rather than distant and minor problems. Unfortunately, there is no place for this view on the Post editorial pages -- when was the last time they had a peice defending SS on their oped page? Even worse, the Post regularly allows it editorial position to creep into its news reporting. News articles routinely refer to the need to "fix" Social Security. There is no objective need to do anything for many years into the future. Remember, Congress and the President literally allowed the program to run out of money in 1982, we are 40 years away from this date at the moment. Congress was not negligent in the 60s when it created Medicare, Medicaid, and Head Start, even though the Post's editors would have insisted that it focus on the Social Security crisis that was less than 2 decades away at the time. (Actually, just a decade away , they had to raise taxes in the 70s as well.)
--Dean Baker