Somewhere, Dubya Is Smiling

Looks like Speaker-in-waiting Boehner wasn’t just shooting on the Social Security retirement age from the hip. He came prepared for PR battle:

Boehner’s office passes along a series of clips that show senior Dems supported lifting the retirement age too.

Those senior Dems include VP Joe Biden, who told the AP in '07 he was open to discussions about raising the cap.House Majority Whip James Clyburn’s official website says raising the age can keep Social Security solvent. “With minor changes to the program such as raising the salary cap and raising the retirement age by one month every year, the program could become solvent for the next seventy-five years,” Clyburn’s website says.

Just last week, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told an audience at an event for Third Way, the centrist think tank [heh], “we could and should consider a higher retirement age."

Remember why the retirement age was set at sixty-five in the first place: because the average life expectancy in 1935 was sixty-one. If FDR Democrats had had any actuarial foresight, they’d have tied the retirement age to average life expectancy in the first place, the current retirement age would be more like seventy-five, and Social Security would be merely endangered rather than in advanced rigor mortis.

Raising it to seventy won’t do a whole lot to drag SS out of the ditch of insolvency, but it’s a step in the right direction. Clyburn makes the mistake of getting too specific to maintain plausible seriousness on the issue. Taking sixty years to raise the retirement age to half of what it needs to be raised when the program doesn’t even have a decade left at current trends and rates is an insult to the public’s intelligence. Of course, given that Boehner would take “only” twenty years to get there puts him in that category as well, but he IS a Republican, so even tripping over the third rail is pretty ballsy. Biden and Hoyer were canny enough to avoid specifics from which they would later have to retreat. But even indicating a general willingness to do something that would actually constitute being part of a real solution gives Boehner and the incoming majority some cover.Ordinarily I'd laugh at the suggestion that False Messia would "deal with a Republican Congress on that point” [LINK] Or ANY point, really. Actually, I do still laugh at it. Acknowledging political reality, much less bowing to it, isn’t one of his strengths. And compromising with your own party on the “public option” in order to clinch ObamaCare and advance the regressive agenda is a far cry from cooperating with the political enemy in “dismantling” its crown jewel.

But if Red Barry’s Ernst Roehm has suddenly seen the privatization light - and it’ll take a whollllle lot more to convince me of that - maybe The One will want to add “Savior of Social Security” to his overhyped, narcissistic trophy case.