Brendan Nyhan

Finals followed by the flu has taken me out of commission for a couple of weeks. More soon, hopefully…

Interviewing Harry Reid on “Meet the Press,” Tim Russert played into the common misperception that private accounts magically solve the problems of Social Security. Here are his questions in order:

MR. RUSSERT:  Private accounts for Social Security–the president has made that a priority of his domestic agenda.  Will you work with him in privatizing part of Social Security?…

MR. RUSSERT:  No private accounts?…

MR. RUSSERT:  But, Senator, there are now 40 million people on Social Security.  In the next 20 years, there’s going to be 80 million.  Life expectancy used to be 65 years old.  It’s approaching 80.  If you have twice as many people on these programs for 15 years, you’ve got to restructure them in some way, shape, or form.  What is your solution?…

MR. RUSSERT:  What is your alternative?

It’s great to say we have to do something about Social Security, but private accounts are not a “solution” and they don’t address the program’s financing shortfall except in a very long term sense. For someone who’s supposed to be smarter and more well-informed than your average Washington journalist, this isn’t very impressive. Russert should know better.

Harry Reid is already making Tom Daschle look like LBJ. When asked by Tim Russert about passing the intelligence reform bill, he directly endorsed Bush’s (incorrect) mandate claims:

MR. RUSSERT:  What must the president do [to pass the bill]?

SEN. REID:  The president, who controls both houses of Congress, should use his power.  And he has said that he has power.  He has a mandate.  Let him pull a few bucks out of that pocket of mandate and give it to the House and Senate and say, “Here’s part of my mandate.  I want this legislation to pass.”

What a fool.

Update 1/7/05: A reader suggests Reid was speaking sarcastically. I still think it’s a terrible strategic mistake regardless, but we need video to be sure about his inflection.

Today’s

Policy analysts say changing the way benefits are calculated could save trillions of dollars in decades to come. But it would imply significant reductions from the benefits promised under today’s laws. The idea behind personal accounts is that workers, by making investments in stocks and bonds, could more than make up the difference with extra earnings.

Did Andrews read the CBO report on the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security plans that combine a switch to price-indexing with a shift to private accounts? Bush recently said the commission created “a good blueprint,” and his economists highlighted its Plan 2 in the 2004 Economic Report of the President. In short, the following CBO analysis of Plan 2 is highly relevant:

CSSS Plan 2 would reduce expected retirement benefits relative to scheduled benefits for all later cohorts, even when the benefits paid from IAs [individual accounts] under CSSS Plan 2 are included.

So “the idea” that Andrews presents as plausible is flatly untrue, at least when it comes to the most specific and relevant plan that has been analyzed to date. Shouldn’t he tell his readers this?

I return to my three points on Social Security. Any good article on the issue should make the following points clear:

1. Social Security’s long-term fiscal imbalance is relatively small and can be addressed through a series of relatively modest changes in rules, eligibility, etc.

2. Private accounts actually make the Social Security imbalance worse, not better, in the short to medium term. Transition costs are estimated at $1-2 trillion. In addition, there are many difficult issues that would have to be resolved to create a well-designed private accounts system. The upshot is that private accounts are an attempt to change the fundamental nature of Social Security (for better or worse), while also addressing financing shortfalls through borrowing and rules changes. They are not a direct solution to the imbalance except in the long term.

3. The massive long-term shortfall in Medicare financing is a much, much bigger problem than Social Security. No one has any good answers for dealing with this.

Via Wonkette — more genius from the image gurus in the Bush administration:

See Ch. 1 & 2 of All the President’s Spin for more on this.

This Washington Post story on presidential press conference questions isn’t too exciting, but it does highlight how little Bush talks to the press. There’s also a great quote describing the President’s relentless message discipline:

White House reporters can go months — or even years — without getting the chance to ask Bush a question. (This reporter has been called on about 15 times in four years.)

Bush has held 16 solo news conferences, compared to 43 for Bill Clinton, 84 for George H.W. Bush and 26 for Ronald Reagan at this point in their presidencies, according to research by Martha Joynt Kumar of Towson University.

These sessions are a contest between Bush’s desire to repeat his previously articulated views (“sticking a tape in the VCR,” as one frequent Bush questioner puts it), and the reporters’ quest to elicit something that will contribute to democracy, not to mention getting them on television or the front page.

More from the mandate beat: The Wall Street Journal’s John Harwood is far too quick to pay deference to Bush’s claims of a mandate, but at least he points out that the election had little to do with backing a specific vision of Social Security reform:

President Bush’s team wasted no time after last month’s election in claiming a mandate for his second-term agenda. With a popular majority and an expanded army in Congress, they had a right to.

But voters can’t endorse specific policies they aren’t aware of. If Mr. Bush has a mandate to do something on Social Security, he doesn’t have a mandate to do anything in particular. And nobody knows that better than his fellow Republicans in Congress, who remain a significant obstacle to the president’s ambition.

And a Nov. 3 CNN/USA Today poll question that I hadn’t seen before makes clear that most people don’t agree with Bush’s mandate claims:

Which comes closer to your view? Because the election was so close, George W. Bush should emphasize programs that both parties support. OR, Because he won a majority of the votes, George W. Bush has a mandate to advance the Republican Party’s agenda.

Bipartisan agenda – 63%
GOP agenda – 30%
Unsure – 7%

dishonestly pretending that private accounts alone solve the system’s problems. Good for him.

Update: Noam Scheiber says Kasich failed to make clear that the transition costs of switching to private accounts undo most of the benefits from switching to price-indexing. Fair enough. But admitting that private accounts aren’t a free lunch is still progress.

Talk about black humor in the midst of war.

Marine officers here maintain that the police are improving. In the current military sweep, called Operation Plymouth Rock, an Iraqi SWAT team was given credit for a series of raids that rounded up numerous insurgent suspects.

I don’t know if I believe it, but here’s an amusing story told by the Green Bay Packers’ Darren Sharper in the latest issue of Sports Illustrated:

“I was in Little League football, eight or nine years old, and somebody stole all the footballs before our Thanksgiving game. Some crackhead probably. We had to play with a frozen turkey. You couldn’t throw it. All you could do was run the ball. It was option all day long.”