Hillary Clinton stubbornly refuses to admit reality on social security. At last nights Democratic debate she once again refused to give any indication of how she will respond to the growing entitlement crisis. She once again used faulty statistics to imply that everything was fine with social security when her husband left office only to be hampered by President Bush.
But this is simply not true as even moderator Tim Russert pointed out. She kept insisting that the magical term “fiscal responsibility” would somehow fix things. But the problem is demographics not the budget. The Baby Boomer’s are going to overwhelm the system and it won’t go away just because you balance the budget.
As I noted before, Ramesh Ponnuru has pointed out how Hillary is trying to spin this:
In recent weeks, she has claimed that when her husband left office, Social Security was projected to be solvent until 2055. She has added that the projection has been cut to 2041 because of President Bush’s fiscal mismanagement.
That’s not right. In 2000, Social Security’s trustees estimated that its trust fund would remain solvent until 2037. (As it happens, I don’t think this trust-fund solvency question is terribly important but for the sake of argument I’ll go with Hillary’s view that it does.) Now it is indeed estimated to be 2041. Under Bush, we’ve gained 4 years rather than lost 14.
Where did Clinton get the year 2055? In the last years of the Clinton administration, Clinton proposed to count the budget surplus toward Social Security and to have the government invest the Social Security funds in the stock market. It claimed that these moves would get us to 2055. Critics said the plan was based on accounting gimmicks that wouldn’t really make Social Security more secure. Whoever was right, the administration’s plan didn’t make it through Congress.
The other candidates flat out admitted that they would need to raise taxes if you take cost saving measures off the table. Having already pandered to the elderly and taken any cost cutting measures off the table now Hillary wants to pretend that she won’t have to raise taxes.
Trying to have it both ways, that is Hillary’s specialty.
