Other Columns by Paul M. Weyrich
Paul M. Weyrich Bio

Printer-Friendly Version

The president has been around the country selling his proposal for Social Security. He plans more travel. He will need it. Let me say at the outset that I am militantly in favor of his Social Security program. I am too old to benefit from it but my children and grandchildren should get a better deal than their mother and I look forward to.

The Democrats are picturing this as some sort of roulette. Yes, it is true the market has ups and downs. If you need the money in the near term it is not a sure bet. But taken on average over a decade, even during the Great Depression, the stock market produces a greater rate of return than virtually any other vehicle. For the program to work workers would need to be able to choose between several competing plans, which would contain a package of several relatively safe investments. Even I would not advocate workers being able to "invest" in get-rich quick schemes.

Getting back to the president's efforts to pass measures, in his State of the Union address, George Bush indicated he is open to any good ideas from Democrats. He is not likely to get many. The Democrats, at least those in the Senate, have concluded that their best chance to return to controlling that body is to lay across the Social Security tracks. They want to stop any private account dead.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said there is no crisis in Social Security. The president says there is a crisis. Guess who else believed there was a crisis in Social Security? A Democrat named Bill Clinton. And guess who said, at the time, he was open to considering private accounts? A Democrat named Bill Clinton. And guess who was not able to solve the Social Security crisis while he was president? Bingo! A Democrat named Bill Clinton.

The problem with Washington is that it is next to impossible to legislate any good idea. It is very easy to stop any good idea. That is because good ideas, by their nature, end up transferring power from those who have it to those who do not. Those who have it, of course, want to keep it. So they have learned every trick of delay and destruction there is. Republicans, beginning a quarter of a century ago with Ronald Reagan, became the Party of new ideas. This was a decade and a half after the Great Society, which was the last period in which the Democrats seemed to be the innovators. The problem for them was their ideas didn't work. So by the time Reagan was running for the presidency in 1980 he was able to say: "Government is not the solution. Government is the problem." From Reagan's tax cuts in 1981, to his marginal rate reduction of 1986, to various forms of deregulation, to the advocacy of abstinence, Republicans became the Party of innovation. While we remember Reagan for his bigger accomplishments, the fact is a great deal of what that president proposed in his eight years in office never saw the light of day. That is because the president had only a slim margin of Republican control of the U.S. Senate during his first six years in office, while the Democrats controlled the House the entire time Reagan was president and controlled the Senate as well during Reagan's last two years in office.

>> Continued -- Page 1 2 3