Fear not.(Social Security)

THE conventional wisdom has it that President Bush's Social Security reform is dead before it has even been proposed. Democrats are nearly united against personal accounts. Republicans are scattered. Some Republicans want personal accounts, but no future benefit cuts. There are Republicans who think that Bush is exaggerating the program's solvency problem. Others want tax reform to be combined with Social Security reform. Still others want no part of Social Security reform at all.

Bush's task is made harder by the fact that the media are not playing the issue straight. Having for years lectured us about the coming fiscal crunch from entitlements, the major newspapers are now minimizing the problem. They are pretending that we have no problem until the 2040s. The truth is that we have to find around $5.8 trillion before that time to pay Social Security's bills. President Bush is the only one around who is trying to figure out what to do about that problem. The media should be congratulating him. Instead, they are criticizing him and even inventing pseudo-scandals. Take the revelation in the New York Times that the Social Security Administration is considering an effort to explain the dimensions of the fiscal problem. This is an agency that, every year, sends all employed Americans a letter listing the benefits the program is supposedly going to give them. That amounts to a massive propaganda effort against reform. For the agency to explain that those benefits cannot be paid for is a step toward true neutrality.

Republicans should fight the misleading press coverage, but there is a limit to how much they can achieve on that front. If the press is not going to report the true dimensions of the program's fiscal problem, reformers should move to more ...