Hillary's Generation Gap.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Why there will likely be no serious reform of Social Security and Medicare - Brief Article

Why Social Security reform withers on the Beltway

Hillary Rodham Clinton may not win her bid for a U.S. Senate seat from New York (in fact, according to some, she still may not run). As the decidedly mixed reactions to her psycho-babble-filled comments in the inaugural issue of Talk - not to mention her disastrous tryout as national health care czarina - suggest her political instincts are far from perfect. But there's no question that she understands why Social Security and Medicare are popular, and why there will likely be no serious reform of those programs until they actually collapse under their own fiscal contradictions.

In a March speech at the National Education Association's Women's Equality Summit, Clinton laid bare why old-age entitlements remain inviolable despite widespread acknowledgment that they are both inefficient and unsustainable. Social Security, she said, is a "family protection system" that keeps families together by keeping generations apart.

"Were it not for Social Security," she elaborated, "many of us would be supporting our parents. We would take them in, we would do what we needed to do to try to provide the resources they required to stay above poverty, to live as comfortably as we could afford."

While one might think this is precisely the sort of extended family situation the author of lt Takes A Village would valorize, nothing could be further from the truth. "That would cause a lot of difficult decisions in our lives, wouldn't it?" she observed. "There would be many families who would have to choose between supporting a parent - an elderly parent - and sending a child to college. It becomes even more pronounced if we add Medicare into that equation. ... [Supporting parents or grandparents] would mean an economic responsibility and an economic burden that we would feel required to shoulder."

No one, Clinton implies, wants that: not seniors, not their middle-aged children, and not their grandchildren. In suggesting this, she is playing generational politics at its most brazen - and its most effective. She explicitly pits college hopefuls against retirees in a sort of death match, with the baby boom generation standing in as the beleaguered yet altruistic referee (a scant 15 years or so from retirement themselves, boomers have more reason than not to maintain the status quo). After conjuring images of resentful teens and needy elders fighting over the remote - if not food, clothing, and shelter - in family...