One issue dogging Hillary Clinton has been her unwillingness to endorse publicly anything more than budgetary prudence and a study committee on the problems of Social Security, criticizing Obama for suggesting a possible hike in the cap on wages subject to the payroll tax to improve SS's finances while simultaneously telling some voters privately that she would consider exactly the same idea.
This morning, the issue came up in NH. Clinton backed her position by citing a NY Times columnist, liberal academic Paul Krugman. "Some of you read Paul Krugman and... he agrees with me," she said. "I think he's a pretty good judge of the political winds."
Princeton economist Paul Krugman, weathervane of the Iowa and New Hampshire heartland? Not that we know of. But Krugman is a weathervane for a certain segment of elite opinion which concluded during the successful resistance to Bush's plan to privatize Social Security that the whole idea that there was a crisis in Social Security was a Republican plot parrotted by stupid journalists, and that in fact the system was not in bad shape.
It's a complicated argument, and it has led -- as Hillary accurately noted -- Krugman to become focused on the counterintuitive idea that Obama is a Republican dupe for proposing ideas to fix Social Security, while Hillary is smart to not tell voters what she'll do about it. Obama, he says, has been "played for a fool."
For Hillary, the idea that there's not really a problem with Social Security has a couple glitches. In 1998, Bill Clinton called for steps to address the "looming crisis" in Social Security. And in January of this year, when she announced for president, Hillary Clinton said one of the "big questions" of the campaign was how to reduce deficits that "threaten" Social Security.
And as it turns out, Krugman has some glitches of his own. As laid out in this recent Washington Post article, titled "Krugman v. Krugman," the Times columnist was for the idea that there was a Social Security crisis -- again, and again, and again -- before he was against it. As recently as 2001 he warned of a "demographic deluge, with no alternative once it arrives except to raise taxes and slash benefits."
So maybe, come to think of it, he and Hillary are a perfect match.
Comments (1)
The indictment of Krugman for criticizing Obama is even worse than you say, since Obama has not proposed an idea to fix Social Security that any conservative would embrace on its own. He's proposed raising the maximum taxable earnings level on which the payroll tax is levied. That should be something that Democrats would favor, particularly as they propose to roll back tax cuts for the wealthy.
For more, see http://voxbaby.blogspot.com/2007/11/krugman-on-obama-on-social-security.html