"If I'm president, I'll submit a plan to save Social Security and Medicare, and I'll ask Democrats in Congress to do the same," McCain said in Memphis. "We'll listen to what people outside government suggest, as well. I'll work on a bipartisan basis to make the hard choices; to protect the retirement security of the American worker and the growth of the American economy."
But no matter what McCain's secret plan to save Social Security and Medicare turns out to be, it will not fly politically. Unless a president is elected with a mandate for specific Social Security and Medicare reforms, he will not get a majority in Congress to vote for those reforms.
President Bush learned this the hard way after the 2004 election. Having not campaigned on Social Security reform, he tried to retroactively create a mandate for it. He toured the country giving Social Security speeches and pre-emptively offered concessions to Democrats. He got nowhere.
The shame of it was that the ideal Social Security reform bill had already been written. Its co-authors are Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Republican Sen. John Sununu of New Hampshire. It would allow a worker to put 6.4 points of the 12.4 percent he and his employer pay in Social Security taxes into a personal retirement account.
At retirement age, the worker would be required to use money from this account to purchase an annuity that would pay him the equivalent of the Social Security benefit to which he would otherwise be entitled. If the worker's account did not have enough money to pay for the annuity, the government would make up the difference. If it had more than enough, the worker would keep the difference.
In the America this reform would create, the elderly would not be dependent on government and young workers would not be taxed into penury.
Moreover, Social Security's chief actuary determined that the Ryan-Sununu plan would make Social Security solvent.
McCain or any other presidential candidate who prominently embraced this kind of reform would incite a debate he could win -- before the election -- which is the only way he could win the debate after the election.