This week’s coverage will be a bit interrupted, as I begin the proper grooming of National Review’s latest subscriber, Connor Geraghty, entering the world at 11:10 Sunday morning, a healthy 6 pounds and 11 ounces. (His mother is fine, and has not yet noticed the elephants on his crib mobile, subtly suggesting he vote Republican starting in 2026.)

But I had enough time to notice Hillary Clinton telling the AARP that, as president, she would move quickly to fix Social Security’s long-term finances, but that cutting benefits or raising the eligibility age would be “off the table.”

As I had noted earlier when Hillary said, “privatization is off the table because it’s not the answer to anything”, when raising the retirement age, cutting benefits, and private accounts are taken off the table, what’s left? You’re pretty much left with the option of bringing more money in, a move more commonly known as tax increases.

And earlier today, Hillary’s spokesman insisted she will oppose increasing payroll taxes. I asked David C. John of the Heritage Foundation, who Congressional Quarterly called “one of five experts who exert more influence on the Social Security debate than anyone else in Washington, for his sense of what Hillary’s planning if she seems to be against everything and for nothing:

“The sad thing is, I think there’s something in the water, because the head of Senate Finance Committee [Max Baucus, D-Mont.] said something similar earlier this year,” John said. “I’ve been looking for a fourth way to fix Social Security, and I haven’t found it. There are three ways: first to raise taxes; the second is to cut benefits, and while there are a lot of ways to do it easiest is to raise the retirement age, and the third is some form of personal account, and there are dozens of ways to do that.”

“When you’ve counted out all three, you fall back on wishful thinking,” he continued. “There are some who have argued that growth in the economy is going to fix it, but the Social Security Administration has looked at that over the years, and if I’ve got numbers right, the odds of that happening are about two and a half percent – or as I would put it, 97.5 percent chance of that not happening.”

He concluded with a bit of wise advice: “I would recommend parsing [her statement] out; with a Clinton, you always have to parse it out.”

Noting that Clinton’s statement only rules out raising payroll taxes, John said, “There’s proposal out there, that AARP likes, that would rededicate a portion of what we used to call the estate tax, and now call the death tax, as a permanent way of funding Social Security. There’s also been talk of a ‘wealth tax’ taking about 3 percent on wealth above a certain level.”