Congress Left to Confront Hardest Work on Deficit and Social Security

Author: Miles Benson

Published: February 4, 2005

President Bush has left all the heavy lifting on Social Security reform to a nervous Congress, and observers say the political burden on lawmakers will increase with the budget he sends Monday to Capitol Hill.

White House officials acknowledge that the personal investment accounts Bush is proposing for Social Security will have no effect on the program's fiscal problems. Congress must make benefit cuts to save the system from the financial crisis the president says is bringing it to bankruptcy.

The budget, meanwhile, will invite lawmakers to make other painful cuts in federal spending -- and to face the consequences with their constituents.

Bush will ask Congress to substantially reduce or eliminate 150 federal programs that he has not yet identified and to hold all increases in discretionary spending below the inflation rate. Both requests are part of his effort to halve the federal deficit by 2009.

But political experts of every stripe are skeptical about whether the Republicans controlling Congress -- most of whom, unlike the president, must face the voters next year -- will have much stomach for the task.

"Politicians find it awkward to run for office on a platform of sacrifice, and the Republicans are not finding it any easier than the Democrats," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the bipartisan Concord Coalition. "It's easier to talk about expanding federal programs and cutting taxes."

Said Democrat Leon Panetta, who was budget director and White House chief of staff under President Clinton, "You can't reduce deficits without inflicting pain. If politicians don't want to inflict pain, there won't be any deficit reduction. These lessons never get learned in Washington."

Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist at the National Center for Policy Analysis, agreed.

"We've reached the point where Congress treats every president's budget, regardless of party, as pretty much dead on arrival," said Bartlett, who was a deputy assistant treasury secretary under Bush's father. "Congress will do whatever they feel like doing. There has been no effort to enforce a budget vision. This president never vetoed anything. He just signs whatever they send him. So why should they pay attention to him?"

Panetta said that since Republicans captured control of the federal government, they have been acting like Democrats.

"In the 30 years I have been around Washington, I think politics has literally been turned on its ear," he said. "When I was in Congress as chairman of the (House) Budget Committee, the Republicans were the strongest voices on the need to reduce the deficit and control the budget. Now you've got a Republican president and a Republican Congress that really have not exercised any kind of fiscal discipline in terms of controlling the budget."

With the war against terrorism forcing up defense and homeland security spending, and discretionary programs amounting to a fraction of federal spending, entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security must be on the block if the deficit is to shrink.

Though Bush called for no such cuts in his State of the Union address Wednesday, the White House says they are needed, particularly in Social Security.

"In a long-term sense, the personal (investment) accounts would have a net-neutral effect on the fiscal situation of the Social Security and on the federal government," a senior administration official told reporters at a briefing this week, on condition that he not be identified. "We're not making representation that the personal accounts alone are fixing the system's finances."

Robert Reischauer, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and now head of the Urban Institute, said, "Significant deficit reduction is going to require restraint from a broader range of budget components. ... There are going to have to be some increases in taxes and some more broadly shared sacrifice on the entitlement front."

But Bush has ruled out tax increases, including the payroll taxes that now finance Social Security benefits. Meanwhile, the most important entitlement change enacted under his presidency has been an expansion, not a cut -- the addition of prescription drugs to the benefits that Medicare provides Americans over 65.