Entitlements, John Harwood says, are a key element in 2016 politics, mostly focusing on the Republican side and who can win the austerity race. There's a larger question he's not getting though. Here's the core of his piece.
Social Security and Medicare consume more than 40 percent of federal spending. The trustees of the programs, beseeching lawmakers to shore up their finances, project that they will swell to 11.5 percent of the entire economy within 20 years, compared with 8.4 percent in 2013. Yet the debate in Washington has been frozen since President Obama and the House speaker, John A. Boehner, failed to strike a “grand bargain” on tax and spending levels.
The pressures of the presidential campaign have revived the conversation. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, badly wounded by scandal, chose the entitlement issue as a way to jump-start his prospects among conservative Republican primary voters. “It’s time to tell the truth about what we need to do,” he said in New Hampshire last month. His bracing proposal: Raise the retirement age, increase Medicare premiums for affluent retirees and eliminate Social Security payments to beneficiaries with $200,000 of other annual income.
Meanwhile, he sniffs, "Democrats, with an entirely different constituency, have begun talking about increasing benefits," pointing out that it's central to Sen. Bernie Sanders' platform, and that Hillary Clinton is sure to jump on board. Oh, those pandering Democrats. Even President Obama, he points out, "like Mr. Christie […] has proposed higher Medicare premiums for the affluent; like Mr. Cruz, he has expressed a willingness to accept curbs on inflation increases in Social Security benefits." There you go, your Beltway media platonic ideal of bipartisanship: the willingness to screw over the olds.
Maybe Sanders and Clinton do have a "different constituency" but there's more to this than the horserace. There's the growing realization among Democrats—finally!—that they don't have go along with the austerity fetish and deficit peacockery. It's a reflection that they've come to the realization that the middle class is endangered, and that along with that, retirement security is becoming a thing of the past. But they're also seeing that it can be regained. They're finally getting that there are ways to address the deficit that don't involve hurting the vulnerable even more, and that there's a pretty straightforward solution in just making the tax system more equitable and save and strengthen these key programs, and that includes lifting the cap on payroll taxes that fund Social Security.
Now, Sanders and (hopefully) Clinton and Donna Edwards and Chris Van Hollen certainly all recognize that there's a real political advantage in this for them, too. But there's real debate here to be had, where good politics and good policy converge. Maybe the traditional media will even get in on it eventually.