Let’s take a break from analyzing Mike Huckabee’s views about showers and the transgendered to listen to what he has to say on entitlement reform.
In the former Arkansas governor’s telling, Social Security and Medicare aren’t entitlements at all.
“These programs are not entitlements, they are earned benefits,” Huckabee said Tuesday. “The government took that money from you involuntarily when you started working — with the promise that you’d get that money back when you retire. For the government to even think about breaking that promise is absolutely ridiculous.”
Huckabee characterizes proposed reforms to these programs as both “political suicide” and “economic suicide.”
The problem is that the government has made promises it can’t keep under demographic and economic conditions that are very different than in 1935, when Social Security was enacted, and 1965, when Medicare was created. Ignoring these facts is fiscal suicide.
Right now, Social Security and Medicare are the biggest drivers of the long-term debt. They are facing shortfalls that already imperil future retirees. Social Security in particular offers a raw deal for younger workers.
Perhaps there are better ways to reform these programs than raising the retirement age. But vague promises to grow our way out of insolvency aren’t likely to do the trick. One of the reasons entitlement reform has been political suicide is that too many politicians pretend there are bigger savings in congressional pensions than in two of the largest federal spending programs.
Huckabee has been criticized for pushing unproven cures for diabetes. Will unproven cures for the country’s fiscal problems be next?
