Bush to dismantle Social Security, claims unwarranted mandate

NOTE: Contrary to the assertions by the reporter of this article, who should have checked his facts first, the election, assuming that all votes were/are actually counted as cast, was not, as this reporter states, a "decisive win." In point of fact, Bush won by the smallest margin since 1918. Bush also has the distinction of having more votes cast against him than any President in US history. So when Bush declares that he "earned capital in the campaign, political capital," he is talking out of the side of his mouth.

The New York Times
November 5, 2004
Confident Bush Outlines Ambitious Plan for 2nd Term
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 - A confident President Bush vowed on Thursday to move quickly and vigorously to enact the ambitious agenda he set out during the campaign, saying, "The people made it clear what they wanted."

In a 40-minute news conference a day after he declared victory over Senator John Kerry, Mr. Bush said he would begin work immediately on his proposal to overhaul Social Security, one of the biggest goals in his second-term agenda. He called for Congress to move speedily to limit lawsuit awards against doctors, said he would push for tougher educational standards for high schools and signaled that he had settled on broad principles for rewriting the tax code.

"Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it," Mr. Bush said, asserting the power he held after a decisive win and reclaiming the national stage as his own after sharing it for months with Mr. Kerry.

Mr. Bush said repeatedly that he wanted to reach out across party lines after a campaign that emphasized ideological divisions and produced raw feelings on both sides. But he left unclear how much, if at all, he would compromise especially after an election that gave him a majority of the popular vote, strengthened conservative Republicans in Congress and left Democrats weaker.

"My goal is to work on the ideal and to reach out and to continue to work and find common ground on issues," he said at one point. But at another, he suggested that his idea of common ground would be very close to the platform he ran on.

After a long campaign, he said, "there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view, and that's what I intend to tell the Congress."

When the questioning turned to perhaps the most ideologically charged issues facing Mr. Bush in a new term - the likelihood of his making one or more nominations to the Supreme Court - Mr. Bush gave no indication of how he would balance pressure from the evangelical Christians who played an important role in winning his re-election and his stated desire to reduce the nation's partisan tensions. He said only that no vacancy now existed and that when one did he would choose "somebody who knows the difference between personal opinion and the strict interpretation of the law."

Asked whether the support he received from conservative evangelical Christians raised concerns about the nation's becoming split politically between people for whom religion is very important and those for whom it is less so, Mr. Bush said, "I will be your president regardless of your faith, and I don't expect you to agree with me necessarily on religion."

The president was jocular and assertive during the session with reporters, held in an auditorium on the Eisenhower Executive Office Building before he left for a long weekend at Camp David to recover from the last grueling leg of the campaign.

He said he would think about changes to his cabinet and the White House staff, noting that departures are inevitable but adding that he had made no decisions.

With rumors already swirling about who will stay and who will go, his aides said that he intended to move quickly on personnel issues to minimize the speculation and assure that he had his new team in place for a fast start to his second term. The aides said he had not asked for any resignations, but had told cabinet members on Thursday morning that if they planned to leave, they should tell Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff.

In the news conference, Mr. Bush also addressed foreign policy and his plans for Iraq. Asked about the planned offensive by United States and Iraqi forces against the insurgents who effectively control Falluja and several other cities, Mr. Bush replied, "In order for Iraq to be a free country, those who are trying to stop the elections and stop a free society from emerging must be defeated."

He provided no timetable for an offensive, though the intensive preparations on the ground suggest that it could be imminent. He said that he expected 125,000 Iraqis to be trained as security forces by the time of the first round of Iraqi elections in January, but that he had not had any requests from military commanders to place more American troops on the ground to help assure that the elections come off.

Last month, the Pentagon ordered about 6,500 soldiers in Iraq to extend their tours, strengthening the American military presence there in preparation for the elections.

Mr. Bush restated a central campaign theme, that spreading freedom and democracy was the best long-term solution to fighting terrorism and its causes. He said he still had faith in his plan to bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and when told erroneously by a reporter that Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, had died, he said, "God bless his soul."

Mr. Bush called on the outgoing Congress to break the impasse between the House and the Senate on legislation that would create a national intelligence director, one of the main recommendations of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. He also made clear that he would put a full set of substantively and politically complex domestic policy proposals before the new Congress when it convenes in January, starting with Social Security but also including education, limits on lawsuits and rethinking the tax code.

"I readily concede I've laid out some very difficult issues for people to deal with," Mr. Bush said.

Aides said Mr. Bush planned to begin talking to members of Congress about Social Security in coming weeks, and to begin a big push to sell the public on his approach in his inaugural address, his State of the Union Message and his budget, all early next year.

As he did in 2000, Mr. Bush campaigned this year on his proposal to add voluntary personal investment accounts to Social Security, letting workers divert part of their payroll taxes into stocks and bonds for their retirement. But he has never answered the big questions that would accompany any effort to remake the system, starting with how, in an era of large budget deficits, he would continue to pay for full benefits for current retirees if payroll taxes from current workers are partially diverted to private accounts.

Personal accounts could provide greater returns than those earned by the system currently. But they are unlikely, by themselves, to address Social Security's long-term financial problems, which will become acute over the next several decades as the baby boom generation begins reaching retirement age and life expectancies continue to rise.

Mr. Bush has never said what steps he might support, along with the creation of personal accounts, to pay for the new system and fill the long-term financial hole projected by Social Security's trustees. Beyond higher returns through investment, the menu of options is not appealing to either political party: benefit cuts to reduce expenses or tax increases to increase the amount of revenue flowing into the system.

Mr. Bush acknowledged the political difficulties in the news conference, but said that doing nothing would be an even worse option. He said he would start by referring both parties in Congress to the report done for him three years ago by a commission whose co-chairman, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, was a Democrat. Mr. Moynihan, the four-term senator who died last year, was one of only a few Democrats in Congress to support the idea of personal accounts.

"I'm not sure we can get it done without Democrat participation, because it is a big issue, and I will explain to them and I will show them Senator Moynihan's thinking as a way to begin the process," he said.

Mr. Bush has also been vague about how he wants to approach changing the tax code. Aides said he would appoint a bipartisan commission by the end of the year to explore all the ideas on the table, including a single-rate flat tax and a national sales tax. The commission, which Mr. Bush first proposed at the Republican convention in September, is to report to Treasury Secretary John W. Snow as early as possible in 2005.

Mr. Bush said at the news conference that he wanted any changes in the tax code to be "revenue neutral," meaning that he did not envision it as a tax cut by another name. He also signaled he would be open to keeping some of the most popular deductions and tax breaks, like the deductions for mortgage interest and charitable giving, in any new system.

When he was pushing for a new tax bill as governor of Texas, he said, "I always noted how important it was for certain incentives to be built into the tax code, and that will be an interesting part of the debate."