Innovative Reforms

Charged up from a discussion, I felt the urge to come up here and post before the energy dissipates.

One of the things that is striking about the debates that rage in politics and the news these days is how narrow the scope of ideas is.

Take the Social Security debate. It seems as though the options presented were: privatization in some form, or a combination of raising taxes and cutting benefits.

When it became clear that the debate was going nowhere, why didn't anyone come up with some alternative that might have appealed more broadly?

Here's the simple idea I was just discussing with some folks: why not give people the option to voluntarily opt out of receiving Social Security? Think about it for a moment. You wouldn't be breaking any promises with anyone. You wouldn't have to argue for some controversial new option. You could just give the people who don't feel like they need the extra income the choice of not putting further strain on an already strained system.

This wouldn't even be politically risky! Politicians who supported it could strike a pose and be the first ones to voluntarily strike themselves off the social security list. It would be a reform that Social Security advocates wouldn't have much room to criticize, and Social Security critics wouldn't have much reason to dislike. Obviously, the latter would argue that this doesn't go nearly far enough--but goddammit, it's people like that who've been an even bigger problem than the former.

If you stick to an "all or nothing" line where reform is concerned, odds are you are going to get nothing. Sure, this little idea probably wouldn't be enough to make Social Security sustainable in the long run. But we don't even know that for certain--the number of people willing to opt out is not something you can predict, and I think it would be kind of interesting to observe. Regardless, it would be doing something. It would be taking some strain off of the system, even if only a little.

But you just don't see that sort of thing being debated in Congress. We don't seem to be living in a particularly imaginative moment.