We’ve reached the point in the midterm election campaign where Democrats insist that Republicans are itching to destroy Social Security. The usual gambit is to take stray comments from one or two Republicans and pretend that they represent a secret and sinister plan.
In October 2018, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell observed that “there’s a bipartisan reluctance to tackle entitlement changes.” His Democratic counterpart, Chuck Schumer, said he had “showed who the Republican Party really is.”
In the elections a few weeks later, Republicans expanded their control of the Senate. They did not move to cut any of those programs.
Republicans are not plotting to undermine Social Security. They don’t even have a plan to fix it. Which is a pity, since benefits are still growing beyond the program’s revenues.
If we want benefits to keep growing as projected, we need to have broad-based tax increases. But most people would prefer to keep their taxes low and save the money themselves. For that to work, we have to moderate the growth of benefits so that they keep up with inflation but do not rise much more.