We like several things about his plan. Foremost, it faces the solvency problem head on. By one respected estimate, Social Security is projected to start paying out more than it collects in 2018, and exhaust its trust fund in 2042.
Bennett would ease that problem using different indexes to compute the increases in benefits that compensate for inflation. He would do that in a way that would be progressive, meaning that his plan would be more generous in protecting the benefits of people at the bottom of the income scale than those at the top.
His original plan also would have included a form of private accounts. Since President Bush's barnstorming for that idea has crash-landed - for good reason - the White House has given the OK for Bennett to offer two separate bills. One would change the benefits indexes, the other would introduce private accounts.
We always have been leery of the president's push to divert a portion of payroll taxes into private accounts. For one thing, that would make the solvency problem much worse, not better, at least in the short term. For another, it would change the entire nature of Social Security, which has never been an investment scheme. There already are IRAs and 401(k) plans to fill that niche.
Social Security is, and always has been, something fundamentally different, a simple income transfer from younger generations to the elderly so that, no matter what happens in the stock market or the economy, old people don't go hungry. That still seems like a sound idea to us.
Bennett and the White House are changing tactics partly to draw the Democrats into a give-and-take about Social Security reform. The Democrats are resisting, because they sense a bait-and-switch in which the Senate would not pass private accounts, the House would, and a conference committee would put them into the final bill, where the Democrats would have less power to stop them.
We share the Democrats' misgivings.
The trouble with Bennett's plan is that by reducing benefits to most taxpayers, including the middle class, while preserving them for low-income people, Social Security would become more like welfare. Public support for it would erode. And that won't solve anything.
