Say Anything Blog

Here's one detail most media outlets won't report on the Social Security debate: At least one Democratic leader once supported moving all federal employees out of the system. That leader is Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who as a House member in 1983 sponsored a bill to push all federal employees, including members of Congress, the president and vice president, out of Social Security. The bill ultimately failed to attract a single cosponsor and died an obscure death without ever even coming to a vote.

Mr. Reid offered his bill just a few months after President Reagan signed into law the Social Security compromise that raised taxes, raised the retirement age and, for the first time, subjected the country's elected leaders to Social Security. Democrats now hold up that 1983 compromise as a model for President Bush. But Mr. Reid, in HR 3589, tried to undo a major tenet of that compromise, even while keeping the higher taxes and the reduced benefits for the rest of us working stiffs.

President Bush won't mention any of this today as he stops in Galveston, Texas, to highlight a local government that has opted to stay out of the Social Security system. Almost half of the Lone Star State's one million state and local government employees do not fall within the Social Security system. Nationwide, some five million out of 26.3 million state and local government employees still remain out of the system thanks to an option that existed before the 1983 reforms. If Mr. Reid had had his way, hundreds of elected federal officeholders would also have been off the hook for paying into the Social Security system and depending on it for their retirement benefits. That's an option that millions of private-sector Americans don't have, but perhaps they should.