10/31/00 2:35 p.m.
Gore’s Parting Ploy
He’s wrong on Social Security.

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru

t the Republican convention in August, George W. Bush told the elderly that he would "keep the promise of Social Security…no changes, no reductions, no way." He went on, "Our opponents will say otherwise. This is their last, parting ploy, and don't believe a word of it." Sure enough, just in time for Halloween, the Democrats are accusing Bush of threatening the program's benefits.

Bush's plan would let individuals invest some of their payroll taxes in capital markets. (The figure his campaign uses for illustrative purposes is two percent of wages, which would amount to $900 billion.) Gore says that those taxes are already pledged to Social Security benefits, and that Bush is promising the same money to two generations at once.

Gore is empirically wrong. It is estimated that over the next ten years, payroll taxes will bring in $2.4 trillion more than Social Security needs to pay benefits to today's elderly. That extra money could finance the private accounts.

Gore's larger mistake is conceptual. Social Security already promises benefits to today's retirees and tomorrow's; Bush hasn't undertaken any new obligations. The question is how to finance existing obligations. Bush's plan uses the returns from private investment to make those obligations easier to finance. The private accounts are not funded by reducing future benefits; they are future benefits. Gore's alternative is to lock all that money away so that it can't be productively invested. The program's obligations would have to be met, if they were met, entirely through tax increases and spending cuts. Gore's attack may be politically successful, but Bush was right back in August: Don't believe a word of it.

All over the Map
Michael Barone's latest column in U.S. News explains why the states aren't lining up as usual in the presidential race: During the Clinton years, the Democrats gained votes in "the nation's very largest metropolitan areas" while losing them "in rural areas and the fast-growing metropolitan fringe." This, he writes, is "why New Jersey (100 percent major metro) is solidly Democratic, why Illinois (where metro Chicago casts nearly two thirds of votes) is the most Democratic Midwestern state, why California (where metro L.A. and the Bay Area cast two thirds of votes) has been leaning to Gore." Barone attributes both the metropolitan and rural trends to cultural issues such as abortion and gun control.

So who comes out ahead? Barone notes that the "major metro areas are casting a declining share of the nation's votes, while fast-growing counties beyond metro-edge cities, with family-size subdivisions and megachurches, are heavily Republican…. The new political map puts Bush in a weaker position than his father was in 1988 in California, Illinois, New Jersey, Florida, and six other states, with 145 electoral votes. But it puts him in a stronger position in 19 states with 201 electoral votes."