The impossible reform.(on the right)(social security reform)

GSTAAD, MARCH 5

FROM all ideological quarters, people are pushing and pulling in the matter of Social Security reform. The sheer steepness of any approach to reform is vivid in memory, the most humiliating example of which was the attempt by Reagan, a few months after he took office. A proposal was whispered in the Senate, resulting not merely in defeat for the proposal, but in denunciation of its sponsor with a 96-0 vote. Although Reagan showed, in his speech to the White House Conference on Aging a few months later, that he grasped the nature of the problem brilliantly, he himself got out of the way. If the Senate is 100 percent opposed, go fish elsewhere. Which he did, but what he then agreed to in 1983 was an increase in the payroll tax and the levels at which income became taxable. The extra Social Security revenues thus collected have been raided for general government expenses ever since.

Bush is palpably sincere in his call for reforms--or rather, for thought to be given to reforms. He suffers several disadvantages. The first of course is the election. To talk about reforms for Social Security in the heat of an election campaign is to run over your political advisers in a Mack truck. Their responsibility is to win elections, not to save Social Security.

A second obstacle is his own record, at two levels. The first, for which he is directly responsible, is his vulnerability on the deficit. A president who has never used his veto power to curb ornery congressional greed has special difficulties urging reform in Social Security payments.

The second is not traceable to him directly, except as an acquiescent president who went along with his predecessors in spending Social Security revenues as if they were conventional tax receipts. Between 1983 and 2001 a total of $667 billion in excess Social Security revenues was spent.

Enter Alan Greenspan, who testified to a congressional committee that Social Security payments should be reshaped in closer accord with reality.

The proposal of Reagan in 1981 that was rejected by the Senate was that there should be a cut in benefits for those ...