Say what you want about President Bush, you can't doubt his sincerity or his courage. In seeking to gain the support of some Democrats for personal retirement accounts, he has tentatively proposed cutting promised future Social Security benefits of middle-income workers. But watching George Allen, R-Va., and Chris Dodd, D-Conn., oppose the middle-class cut in benefits on "Meet the Press" Sunday is a signal of what's ahead for this proposal. Bush also says he would consider hiking the retirement age or raising Social Security taxes. These suggestions are bad ideas, but most of all they are unnecessary. They won't fly politically, they are an invitation to political demagoguery and, I fear, they would cause a political problem for Republicans.
Liberal economist Paul Krugman already has called Bush's "progressive price indexing" a "gut punch to the middle class," but we expect that from the Krugmans of the left. Before Republicans consider going any farther down this track, however, they should remember what happened after the mid 1980s. In 1985 the Senate froze COLAs in the name of fiscal prudence and deficit reduction. In the 1986 midterm election, Republicans lost eight Senate seats and gave control of the Senate back to the Democrats.
I learned early in my political career, representing a working-class district in Buffalo, N.Y., that the politics of pain and austerity is a loser, and what's worse it is bad economics. Liberals understand this political maxim instinctively because they are in the business of using government to spread around spending and income redistribution rather than protecting life, liberty and property. They cut their political teeth learning to extract just enough tax revenue from businesses and middle- and upper-income individuals to support government spending programs as lavishly as possible without causing taxpayers sufficient pain to revolt.
Periodically, as liberals overreach on the left, voters revolt, throw sufficient numbers of them out of office and replace them with "center right" conservative majorities. And just as invariably, it seems, conservatives misinterpret what voters are demanding and proceed to talk about slashing government spending and inflicting pain and austerity on the public in the name of fiscal prudence. In reality, voters aren't voting for government to inflict more pain on them; they are voting for government to keep the promises it has made while devising new solutions that will relieve the pain government has inflicted.