The demise of Social Security reform.(Correction, Please!)

ITEM: Discussing the collapse of Social Security reform, USA Today commented: "Just one year after Bill Clinton introduced his health care overhaul in 1993, the plan collapsed. It took only eight months for the same to happen to President Bush's proposal to create private Social Security accounts. The two episodes are strikingly similar. Both involved ambitious proposals introduced to the public with speeches to Congress. And both lingered for months after chances for success had evaporated. Indeed, when Bush all bat conceded defeat in a news conference last week, noting a 'diminished appetite 'for his proposal, his remarks were barely noticed."

The October 10 editorial went on to say: "Like Clinton's health plan, Bush's proposal for Social Security was doomed from the outset. It was conceived with virtually no input from Democrats by a commission handpicked to reach a predetermined outcome--that individual accounts were a necessary part of reforming Social Security."

The newspaper asserted that private accounts "would do nothing to fix Social Security's problems and could make them worse." Making the system .... should be the "central focus" of reform--which will "require some mix of cuts in benefits" and "increases in taxes (such as raising the $90,000 cap on annual income subject to Social Security taxes)."

CORRECTION: While there's no denying that the Bush administration wasted an opportunity to overhaul many of the problems of Social Security, it's absurd to contend that having a better partisan mix in some preliminary panel was necessary to make a change. After all, would that alter the fact that the system is bankrupt and a horrible deal for America's young workers, who can expect (at best) to receive a negative rate of return? Would congressional statists be swayed by the political registration of commissioners? Would the relentless left-wing media opposition to private accounts have disappeared?

Indeed, there hasn't been much difference in the coverage in the Communist or radical or "mainstream" media over how to "reform" Social Security. The People's Weekly World, the voice of the Communist Party USA that calls itself "the direct descendant of the Daily Worker," maintained in its October 20 issue that the "defeat of the attempt to privatize Social Security is a tremendous victory, one that we should all celebrate and be proud of." The Communists also said they backed an increase in or "even eliminating the salary cap on incomes that are taxed for Social Security."

Similarly, New York's largest Spanish-language paper, the far-left El Diario, ...