Moment of Candor

In today's New York Times, we get a rare glimpse of what the White House really thinks about Social Security "reform," courtesy of a leaked memo written a few days ago by Peter Wehner, Rove's deputy:

White House officials privately concede that the centerpiece of Mr. Bush's approach to Social Security — letting people invest some of their payroll taxes in private accounts — would do nothing in itself to eliminate the long-term [funding] gap.

The real savings would be realized by reducing future benefits, most likely by abandoning the practice of setting a person's initial benefit as a fixed percentage of preretirement earnings. Benefits would keep pace with inflation, but analysts estimate that benefits for a middle-income worker who retires in 2065 would be about 50 percent lower than the benefits promised under today's law.

"We simply cannot solve the Social Security problem with Personal Retirement Accounts alone," wrote Mr. Wehner, the White House political strategist, in his memorandum last week. "If the goal is permanent solvency and sustainability — as we believe it should be — then Personal Retirements Accounts, for all their virtues, are insufficient to that task."

Private accounts aren't really a part of the solution, and as I've said before, they will not be able to make up for the benefit cuts being proposed. But that's not a dealbreaker for most of the conservatives pushing the plan because the virtue of private retirement accounts isn't what they do for the retiree, it's what they do to the Democratic Party:

Norquist has had far less trouble uniting conservatives and corporations around his master plan for taking down the Democratic Party. By design, each of the prongs in that strategy is a win-win. Tort reform, for example, attracts millions in campaign lucre from corporate leaders while undermining trial lawyers, a major Democratic support base. School choice divides largely Democratic inner-city communities desperate for better education and undermines the authority of teachers' unions. Social Security privatization could one day provide a windfall to Wall Street brokers, who increasingly favor Republicans with campaign donations, while eliminating one of the most successful Democratic government programs in history. Tax cuts for rich investors give a Republican voting bloc even more money to send to campaigns. There is nothing accidental about this. "You want to make your team bigger and their team shorter," Norquist explains. "And the trial lawyers fund their team, labor unions fund their team, city tax collectors fund their team."

Leading conservatives like Norquist have been very open about their goals and how they will achieve them, so why is it so hard for most people to recognize what's going on when the White House follows that plan? The path this administration has been following has been clear from the beginning — Social Security "reform" is just another step.