Social Security Grand Strategy

IN THE CURRENT campaign for Social Security reform, we should not lose sight of the forest for the trees. All the talk about trust funds, caps, IOUs, actuarial scoring, and bankruptcy is mere ritual, the rich symbolic pageantry of the national Social Security cult. Beneath the solemnities Social Security is just another government program. Actually, it is two programs. There is the FICA tax program that imposes a tax upon American workers and American businesses. Then there is the Social Security benefit program that sprays out checks to certain Americans that meet complex eligibility criteria. There is no necessary connection between the two, whatever the reform opponents say.

We must ignore the distractions and think about what we want and about how to get there. What we want is to cut taxes and reduce the government’s benefit programs. We want to entice Americans off the liberal plantation and encourage them to build their own family farms.

What we want, long-term, is to dismantle the rule of the experts and replace it with an ownership society in which mediating structures flourish luxuriantly between the individual and the megastructures of big business, big government, big education, big foundation, and big labor. With Social Security, we want to take the 15 percent of Americans’ wages presently going to the federal government in FICA taxes and give it back to them so they can spend it on themselves. If it makes everyone feel better we will agree to force Americans to save what they get back in taxes rather than spend it.

Any deal that comes out of Congress this year that cuts some money out of FICA and gives it back to taxpayers is a worthwhile down payment on this strategy. If President Bush gets a deal that digs four percent out of FICA tax payments for young people this year, we win. If he gets two percent, we win. Either way, we have got the camel’s nose under the tent.

Many commentators, including the president, have talked about 2018 as the year when the Social Security problem begins as the program starts to pay out more than it takes in FICA taxes, or later at the moment in 2042 when “the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt.” But this is misleading.

Social Security doesn’t suddenly become a problem in 2018. It is a problem right now. Social Security and Medicare keep getting bigger, as a proportion of federal spending, every year. The checks must be funded with tax monies or with borrowing. Every year they crowd against other programs that politicians and constituents want, and every year the moment when real spending cuts or real tax increases will be necessary gets closer. From the Republican point of view, the sooner the better.

But from the Democratic point of view, the future is agonizing, according to Matt Miller:

“How do we propose to make the health and pension programs for seniors sustainable while also paying for needed nonelderly initiatives? And how do we do all that while keeping overall taxes as a share of GDP at levels that donÃ‚Â´t hurt economic growth (without pushing taxes beyond levels Americans are likely to support)?”

You have to feel sorry for the Democrats. All of a sudden noisy Republican boys are out in the street knocking baseballs around, and any moment a ball will be coming in through the front window. Whatever happened to those nice polite Republican children from back in the 1950s?

Here’s what happened. Republicans woke up one day, felt the hair on their chests, and decided that it was Morning in America. It gradually dawned on them that if they accidentally broke the windows of the welfare state, nothing would happen. Ever since 1980 (with one dreadful relapse in 1990) they have cut taxes first and asked questions later. Republicans have realized that the welfare state is the Democrats’ problem. If the Democrats want money for health and pension programs they should raise taxes, as they so brilliantly did in 1993. Let the Democrats rush out and fix granny’s windows. Republicans have bigger fish to fry, like madcap schemes to bring democracy to the Middle East.

Democrats are genuinely shocked by President Bush’s strategic boldness. They understand tactics, like saying “I have a plan” in presidential debates, or mau-mauing presidents of Harvard for valuable sinecures. But they are overwhelmed by the president’s calculated risks in war, tax cuts, deficits, judges, and now Social Security reform. Coddled and softened by their tenured jobs and guaranteed pensions they are frightened by people with the fortitude to create a vision, formulate a strategy, and sustain it to completion through inevitable dangers and setbacks. In strategic terms, as understood by the late John Boyd, this means that Republicans can usually get inside the Democrats’ OODA loop and beat them like a drum.

Social Security reform isn’t a problem for Republicans. Social Security reform is a problem for Democrats.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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