*THIS* is why Pelosi was the absolutely correct choice for speaker....

[Roland99]

1. Headline and snippet...

Nancy Pelosi’s Winning Strategy
She beat George W. Bush on Social Security privatization, and she’ll beat Trump on the wall.

Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.

As Matthew Yglesias pointed out not long ago, a fallacy underlay Bush’s argument. Even if you believed Social Security was going bankrupt, diverting some of the tax money that funds it into private accounts wouldn’t solve the problem. It would make the problem worse. To mask that glitch, Bush needed to lure Democrats into offering proposals that actually shored up Social Security’s finances—by cutting benefits, raising taxes, or cutting other spending—but were highly unpopular. Americans would presumably prefer Bush’s cotton candy to the Democrats’ broccoli, and thus empower Bush to fulfill the decades-old conservative goal of ending Social Security as a program of social insurance.

Aiding Bush’s effort was the fact that prominent Democrats had proposed tinkering with Social Security in the past. In his State of the Union address, Bush observed, “During the 1990s, my predecessor, President Clinton, spoke of increasing the retirement age. Former [Democratic] Senator John Breaux suggested discouraging early collection of Social Security benefits. The late [Democratic] Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended changing the way benefits are calculated.” Bill Clinton and Joe Lieberman had even toyed with private accounts.

But Pelosi, then House minority leader, wouldn’t take the bait. She denied that Social Security was in crisis. And she refused to offer a plan for changing it. When a member of Congress asked when Democrats would offer their own proposals, she replied, “Never. Is never good enough for you?”