The DC "Village" And Social Security

Atrios walks down memory lane on Social Security. To really understand how big a victory progressives carved out on this one, which prefigured everything else in Bush's disastrous second term politically, look again at that video from ABC's This Week. Paul Krugman cogently explains that Social Security is not in crisis, is not approaching a crisis, that for Obama to even come close to suggesting a crisis is completely out of bounds, and that the public is reasonably happy with this very successful program. In response, George Will tells the canard that the baby boomers are about to retire and the government can't sustain the elderly "for half their life" (apparently, life expectancy jumped to 124 when I wasn't looking)... and then he AGREES with Krugman that this was a stupid thing for Obama to say. That's incoherent, because Obama and Will are essentially in agreement about the problem, if not the solution. But Will knows that Krugman's argument - and the progressive argument - is so effective, that he defaults to the Krugman position. It helps that he gets to flay Obama a little bit in the process. But George Will is a proto-Villager. He can say that Social Security's in trouble in theory, but he dare not bring up specifics or suggest private accounts as the solution.

Villagers are generally older than the rest of the population, so in a way their focus on Social Security at least makes demographic sense. It does not make any statistical sense unless they keep it in the most folksy, abstract form, and they know it. So despite a little talk about the system in the abstract, we're not going to see a major push toward privatization because the elites who manage the discourse know they can't get away with it. UNLESS Democrats like Barack Obama give them the leeway to bring it up again by making it a campaign issue for no reason (there are a LOT of other ways to draw contrast with Hillary Clinton).