It’s called the third rail for a reason – Social Security expansion saps pc – GOP intransigence and Dem divisions

James G. Chappel is Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History at Duke University. The Froze Politics of Social Security, Feb 13, 2023 dmr

Despite this dire situation, there has not been a congressional vote, even in committee, on major reforms to Social Security since 1983. This has not been for lack of trying, at least among Democrats. In both the House and the Senate, there are serious bills, with significant support, to salvage the program. The most well-developed, known as Social Security 2100, has more than 200 cosponsors in the House. It’s an audacious bill, planning to expand Social Security benefits for the first time since the 1970s, focusing especially on the caregiving workforce. And in the Senate, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have put forth an even more ambitious plan, which would raise taxes and benefits while expanding the program’s solvency for decades. Still, the odds of anything happening with these bills are low, at least for now. In addition to the expected Republican intransigence, Democrats themselves are not united. The relevant division is between a politics of incrementalism and a politics of bold reform and expansion. Social Security 2100 is on the less ambitious end of the spectrum, especially as it has recently been rewritten to keep Biden’s promise of not raising taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. As such, the bill does little to address the solvency issue. The Social Security Expansion Act in the Senate is bolder and does more to address both equity and solvency—but few Democratic senators have cosponsored the bill, leaving it oceans away from the required votes. For all their differences, these bills in the aggregate show that Social Security is perfectly capable of providing a vehicle for progressive welfare reform: any of them would do wonders, most obviously for seniors and disabled workers. But all of us, too, would benefit from knowing that something like a livable income was headed our way at the tail end of a serpentine labor market that has almost completely stopped providing traditional pensions. Despite all this, the enormous energy in recent years around expanding Medicare and Medicaid has not been matched by attention to Social Security: the politics around it have languished. Why? One major reason is that Social Security has a marketing problem. It seems like a boring, wonky program, and one that is in any case unlikely to survive much longer. (A 2015 Gallup poll showed that more than half of Americans did not expect to receive benefits when they retired.) This situation has left the door open for conservatives, who have been baying to privatize Social Security, or at least cut benefits, since the 1970s. However impractical and unpopular this idea is, it is at least an ethos. And it has kept liberals on the defensive: again and again, they rest content by (rightly) showing that privatization would be a disaster and then insisting that Social Security can be “saved,” perhaps with some tinkering to keep it solvent.