President Obama announced this week that Social Security should be expanded rather than cut, thereby joining a growing Democratic consensus on the issue, though I am sure the President is still not progressive enough for some.
“We should be strengthening Social Security,” he declared. “Not only do we need to strengthen it, it is time we finally made Social Security more generous and increase the benefits so that today’s retirees and future generations get the dignified retirement that they have earned.” The expansion, he argued, should be financed by “asking the wealthiest Americans to contribute a little bit more.”
In doing so, Obama is getting on board a movement that’s been brewing within the Democratic Party for a while now. Bernie Sanders, for instance, has introduced legislation that would increase benefits and pay for it by taxing payroll above $250,000 a year; currently, only the first $118,000 in income is taxed. Martin O’Malley responded with an even more ambitious proposal. Elizabeth Warren has been a particularly vocal advocate, proposing an amendment calling for benefits to be increased that every Senate Democrat, save two, voted for. Rep. John Larson (D-CT), Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI), Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI), and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) have each introduced their own plans.
Hillary Clinton has signed on as well, with a plan that would increase benefits for widows and people who drop out of the workforce to care for family members or raise children. That left Obama as the last notable Democrat not yet on board.
There are a myriad ways Social Security can be expanded, and a myriad ways the solvency of the program can be strengthened without raising the retirement age. So the argument within the party will be what benefits should to expand and how to pay for it, rather than cutting benefits or raising the retirement age. This is a huge victory for progressives and liberals in the party.
Who is responsible for it? You can argue that Bernie Sanders’ successful campaign has moved not only Hillary but the entire party and even the President left. Or, could Bernie be only part of the story, with the other part going back to the Grand Bargain days of 2011. Matthew Yglesias explains:
But in addition to a tactical win for the left, Obama’s turnabout on Social Security is the result of a cycle of tactical ineptitude on the part of the American conservative movement.
Five years ago, conservatives had the opportunity to get a Democratic president to sign legislation that would have substantially cut entitlement spending. In exchange, they were asked to agree that high-income Americans should pay higher taxes. They refused, thinking in part that preventing Obama from scoring a bipartisan achievement would make him easier to beat in 2012.
Obama was reelected anyway. Taxes on high-income households went up anyway. And now the politics of entitlement spending have shifted drastically to the left. The Republican Party’s 2016 nominee says he opposes cuts in Social Security benefits, and mainstream Democrats have flipped away from Obama’s openness to cuts to the position that benefits should be enhanced. […]
The progressive wing of the Democratic Party breathed a sigh of relief that right-wing intransigence had essentially bailed them out in 2011 and began a mobilization campaign that has now succeeded in pushing grand bargaineering out of the party mainstream. And Trump has taken over the GOP on a platform that disavows the party’s longstanding support for entitlement reform. [DD: Bullshit on that. Trump will end SS if he is President].
Of course, in life mistakes happen. But what’s particularly striking about this fiasco is there’s been absolutely no self-criticism about it. In the conservative imagination, failures to achieve policy gains are always the fault of perfidy and insufficiently rigorous adherence to the dogma. The idea that, at times, conservative true believers have erred by failing to correctly assess opportunities is never even considered, much less embraced.
The mass conservative freakout over increasing populations of minorities relative to the white population and the election of Barack Obama have saved the Democratic Party from itself. It reelected Obama in 2012. It nominated the worst Presidential candidate in American history. And it will elect Hillary Clinton president. It really is quite amazing. All because Republicans hate brown people.
But that only opened the door for Democrats to move left. The Party did the moving, with progressives, liberals and unions doing the pushing.