No account leadership
Vice President Cheney concedes the obvious:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney left open the possibility Thursday that President Bush would sign a bill to overhaul Social Security without his embattled proposal for personal accounts financed from payroll taxes.
Disappointing, isn't it?
But where one door closes, another opens. Here's a proposal with the potential to promote fiscal discipline in Congress and expose Democratic hypocrisy:
Republican Reps. Jim McCrery of Louisiana, Clay Shaw of Florida, Sam Johnson of Texas and Paul Ryan of Wisconsin announced they were drafting a bill that would wall off the surplus payroll tax revenues Social Security is slated to receive until 2017. They propose transforming government bonds which the government places in Parkersburg, W.Va., as the money is spent on other government programs into personal IOUs for each of the 110 million Americans who pay taxes into the program.
As the Wall Street Journal noted yesterday, "this calls the bluff of Democrats who claim to be the sole protectors of the Social Security trust fund but have done nothing to stop depleting it. Do they want to protect it or not?"