The courage to mouth unpopular cant.
So on Thursday, Tom Vilsack endorses switching from wage to price indexing for social security, shortly before pulling out of the race for the Dem nomination for lack of money. Kevin Drum says:
I'll hazard a guess here: Vilsack proposed this because he believes it's a good idea. It's worth remembering that Vilsack is a former DLC chair and his politics are fundamentally DLC centrist on domestic issues. And it's further worth remembering that reducing future benefits is the kind of compromise position that DLC types have been proposing for years.
True enough, but don't give Vilsack any points for courage. Switching from wage to price indexing of the PIA is, as Matthew Yglesias explained a year ago, really a code for a slow phase-out of social security. It's not that a progressive justification a slow phase-out of retirement benefits to free up resources for more targeted redistributive programs and for health care is unimaginable (though it's worth remembering that social security is a packaged program that also comprises disability and survivor benefits, which typically do keep the lion's share of their recipients out of abject poverty). But Vilsack didn't even begin to make this sort of argument. (Hilzoy has the actual Vilsack quotes.) Instead, he first hid behind some standard DLC bullet-point wonkery and the standard phony cant about long-term solvency of social security as a stand-alone program. Then, in his gruesome "clarification" he seemed to claim that, in switching to price indexing of the PIA, he could still "maintain the purchasing power" of social security -- which is a totally bogus confusion of real and nominal economic growth. This hardly counts as going out on the untenable strength of your convictions or trying to generate discussion of unpopular ideas. It's just bullshit.
I'll hazard a guess here: Vilsack proposed this because he believes it's a good idea. It's worth remembering that Vilsack is a former DLC chair and his politics are fundamentally DLC centrist on domestic issues. And it's further worth remembering that reducing future benefits is the kind of compromise position that DLC types have been proposing for years.
True enough, but don't give Vilsack any points for courage. Switching from wage to price indexing of the PIA is, as Matthew Yglesias explained a year ago, really a code for a slow phase-out of social security. It's not that a progressive justification a slow phase-out of retirement benefits to free up resources for more targeted redistributive programs and for health care is unimaginable (though it's worth remembering that social security is a packaged program that also comprises disability and survivor benefits, which typically do keep the lion's share of their recipients out of abject poverty). But Vilsack didn't even begin to make this sort of argument. (Hilzoy has the actual Vilsack quotes.) Instead, he first hid behind some standard DLC bullet-point wonkery and the standard phony cant about long-term solvency of social security as a stand-alone program. Then, in his gruesome "clarification" he seemed to claim that, in switching to price indexing of the PIA, he could still "maintain the purchasing power" of social security -- which is a totally bogus confusion of real and nominal economic growth. This hardly counts as going out on the untenable strength of your convictions or trying to generate discussion of unpopular ideas. It's just bullshit.
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