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DeMint to Revisit Social Security
Senator Plans to Start Pushing Bill again to Open Private Accounts
By Lauren Markoe, The State.com
September 12, 2005
U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint is behind a GOP plan to breathe life into the Social Security debate.
The Greenville Republican, who made Social Security reform his top issue when running for his first Senate term last year, saw it drop off the national radar not many months after he took office.
"It was hot in the sense that the president was pushing it," said DeMint, referring to President Bush's spring tour to whip up support for private Social Security accounts.
"But it never heated up in the Congress. There was never a proposal with a lot of people behind it until a month before recess."
The proposal DeMint refers to is his own. It would use Social Security's surplus to open private accounts for millions of Americans. Republican House leaders say they are ready to bring it to a vote as early as this month. However, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the death of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist could delay action on the issue and others before Congress.
DeMint filed the proposal as a Senate bill in June, and it gathered significant support among his Republican colleagues until Congress left for its August break.
DeMint worked the phones this summer, calling congressional colleagues to make sure the idea didn't lose steam.
"Jim's really the guy who got us off the dime on this. We're planning on moving on this bill," said U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., a member of the House Ways and Means Committee. "It's a jump-start bill because it's a consensus bill, and the first thing we need to do is stop the raid on Social Security."
Ryan is a sponsor of the House version of what he and DeMint call the "Stop the Raid" bill.
It falls short of what DeMint, Ryan and most Republicans - including U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. - favor: a permanent mechanism by which workers could place substantial portions of what they now pay in Social Security taxes into private accounts that would be invested in stocks and bonds.
DeMint argues the best way to address the looming problem in Social Security - it is slated to start paying out more money than it takes in by 2017 - is to allow for such private investment of Social Security taxes.
Democrats reject what they call the "privatization" of the federal retirement system, saying it puts what should be a secure program at the mercy of unpredictable stock and bond markets.
But DeMint reasons his more modest Stop the Raid proposal, which would set up private accounts only with Social Security's surplus, will face far less resistance in Congress. The plan would end when the surplus ends, in about 12 years.
This year, the Social Security surplus is projected at about $170 billion. Now that money is used to reduce the federal deficit.
DeMint also notes Democrats for years have been railing against Congress' raid on the surplus.
"For me it's good policy, but it also looks like good politics," said DeMint, who served six years in the House before he won his Senate seat. "I've been here long enough to know that this is about as close as it gets to getting something done."
Because the House has been more willing to act on Social Security, the Republican strategy is to pass the bill in that chamber and then move it to the Senate. If it doesn't pass there, DeMint reasons, it will at least expose members of Congress as unwilling to address Social Security.
Democrats aren't necessarily looking at such a vote as a potential source of embarrassment.
"I would be proud to vote against that bill," said U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., who argues that any step toward moving the nation toward personal accounts is one that will weaken the safety net that Social Security has been for the past 70 years.
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