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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (108350)	4/8/2005 1:57:29 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793891

But Congress is SUPPOSED to do that. Yes, Congress is supposed to do that. But Bush has things pretty much centralized, party-wise, which discourages congressional initiatives. Plus he made this a central objective of his administration, which leaves others in his party deferring to him. As for the Dems in Congress, they are being smart for a change, I think, politically speaking. If Bush wants to grab that third rail, they're going to let him. They're not dumb enough to do it. The Democrats, by only opposing, are hurting themselves by showing their true colors as a current party of no new ideas. That may be so, in general, but I don't think it is relevant to SS. There aren't any new ideas for SS. You increase taxes or you cut benefits. Or you get rid of it. That's all the choice there is for fixing the solvency problem. Bush knows he has to cut benefits or increase taxes, too. He hasn't offered a proposal. Perhaps he thought the Dems would be stupid enough to do the dirty work for him. Or perhaps he thought he could get people so excited about personal accounts that the medicine could be slipped in with the sugar and folks would be too distracted to notice. I dunno. But I think the Dems are smart to stonewall from a chess-game perspective. The only way to solve SS is with a commission rather like the way they do base closings. Otherwise the parties risk getting the donkey's tail pinned on them.