In August 2000, the Democratic Leadership Council met at Franklin D. Roosevelt's estate in Hyde Park, New York to plot out its strategy for the future. The result was a document called the "The Hyde Park Declaration" that, among other things, claimed that Social Security and Medicare are "growing at rates that will eventually bankrupt them and that could leave little to pay for everything else that government does. Moreover, the declaration stated that "we can't just spend our way out of the problem" but rather we need "structural reforms that restrain their growth and limit their claim on the working families whose taxes support the programs."
And what would those "structural reforms" look like? Among other things, the DLC called for "Retirement Savings Accounts to enable low-income Americans to save for their own retirement."
If that sounds familiar, it should—it's exactly what President Bush proposed—and Democrats opposed—in early 2005.
Writing in the Christian Science Monitor in 2005, former Minnesota Congressman Tim Penny lamented such a development. He said that despite similarities between the DLC's document and President Bush's plan, Democratic legislators "not only attacked every serious proposal to fix Social Security, [they even] attempted to deny the seriousness of the problem itself." Continuing, Penny said that elected officials need to "put politics aside and join together in forging a bipartisan solution to Social Security's problems."
President Bush echoed a similar theme in a radio address earlier this month by calling for Republicans and Democrats to "come together to confront the challenge of entitlement spending. Should they not, the president continued, "we will saddle our children and grandchildren with tens of trillions of dollars of unfunded obligations. We will leave them with only three bad options: huge tax increases, huge budget deficits, or huge immediate cuts in benefits."
Over the past few months, President Bush has repeatedly said that all options are on the table for Social Security and other entitlement reform. On this issue he has displayed an ability to think strategically about the future, a capacity for innovation, and, perhaps most importantly, a willingness to negotiate. Meanwhile, since rolling to victory in November, Democrats have spent a lot of time talking about their plans to enact bipartisanship legislation. What better place to start than entitlement reform?