How hard is it to understand Social Security? This is Cohen’s full time job. Come on!

I’ll let Matthew Yglesias do the honors on TPM:

Richard Cohen works up some excellent righteous indignation over the Republican Party’s irrational aversion to taxes, but he seems to have a bad case of Washington Post editorial page disease. “George Bush is doing something interesting with Social Security,” he writes, “I kind of like the idea of personal investment accounts if funding them does not weaken the overall program or add to the nation’s incredible debt.”

That’s a bit like saying I like the idea of invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein if nobody gets killed and it doesn’t cost any money. How, exactly, is diverting one third of Social Security’s revenues into another program supposed to be done without weakening the program? Well, obviously, it can’t. [And Cohen’s] idea that “a deal can be made on Social Security” where Bush agrees to raise the FICA cap and Democrats “permit some sort of move toward private accounts” is pure fantasy.

I guess it’s possible, as Brad DeLong says, that Cohen wants add-on accounts rather than carveouts, but if so why didn’t he write that explicitly?

Update 5/3: James Taranto of Best of the Web notes this passage in Cohen’s article:

Whatever the merits of personal investment accounts, they would do nothing to alter the dismal math of Social Security projections. But raising the cap would. Why $90,000? Why not $140,000? Better yet, why not raise it to $140,000 and then raise it to confiscatory levels on obscene payments such as Michael Eisner’s $575.6 million back in 1998 . . .

Then Taranto — try to believe this — compares Cohen’s logic to a suicide bombing:

Raising the cap to $140,000 would amount to an increase in marginal rates of roughly 40% to 45% for taxpayers whose incomes are in the low six figures–a huge tax increase targeted at the most productive Americans. The logic here is similar to that of suicide bombing: It’s worth making a big sacrifice for the sake of making the enemy suffer even more. Somehow, though, we doubt most Americans view Michael Eisner as the enemy.

It’s our political discourse in a nutshell — factual incompetence and vitriol all wrapped up together.