Here’s the second sentence of that Bloomberg News story: ” For both substantive and political reasons, any fix to Social Security must both increase revenues and reduce benefits, budget experts say.”

Really? Senators Hagel, Bennett, and Graham have sponsored plans to fix the program without raising taxes. (Sen. Graham floated the idea of raising taxes to gain Democratic support, but received none, just as Bennett proposed dropping personal accounts to get Democratic support that never materialized.)

A number of other proposals have included increased taxes, not to fix Social Security but to create various forms of personal accounts. The Liebman-MacGuineas-Samwick proposal falls into this category, as does the Kolbe-Boyd proposal. So it’s not obviously the case that a fix to Social Security has to raise revenues, and it’s not even completely clear that raising taxes makes a fix politically easier.