In response to recent fears about the "fiscal responsibility summit" actually being a sneak attack on Social Security, Ezra Kelin writes that the Obama administration will actually use the summit to change the conversation on entitlement reform away from a Social Security and / or Medicare crisis, and instead as a health care crisis:
Talk a lot about the health care crisis and longer-term problems in the budget and get people to stop talking about an illusory crisis in a made-up program called socialsecurityandmedicareandmedicaid.
There is no replay of Bush's crisis-mongering the offing. No commission headed by Kent Conrad with a mandate to cut the program. Any fixes would look more along the lines of, well, the Orszag-Diamond proposal -- which most liberal embraced as the responsible alternative in 2005 -- than the Pete Peterson plan. And it would be mindful of the articles Furman wrote defending Social Security, like this CBPP brief offering 10 facts central to understanding the program.
The Orszag-Diamond plan in may have reached some sort of consensus in certain D.C. circles with people who call themselves "liberal," but it is not, and never was, popular among either liberals around the country or the general population. The reason is, as Jane Hamsher reminds us, that the Orszang-Diamond plan actually cuts benefits (more in the extended entry):
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