Watch what you call welfare.

• Author: Kaus, Mickey

Mickey Kaus, an editor of >;The Washington Monthly from 1978 to 1981, is a senior editor of

The New Republic

In 1972, when the Monthly first proposed cutting the Social Security benefits of the affluent, it was a satisfyingly reckless proposal. Today, this idea-"means-testing"-is alarmingly respectable. Wall Street types like Pete Peterson and Donald Regan endorse it as a deficit-buster. Bruce Babbitt injected it briefly into the 1988 campaign . In Washington it has started to bubble up in conversations with congressional Democr >;ats.

Those conversations are off-the-record, at least for now. In public, Responsible Policymakers declare that benefits should be fully taxed but that checks going to the well-to-do should not actually be cut. That compromise would preserve the fictional analogy of Social Security with private insurance (private insurance benefits are already taxed). But we can expect even this fig leaf to be blown away in the next budgetary storm. You can raise a lot more money by eliminating benefits than by merel >;y taxing them. In order to finance the current policy of full-benefits-for-the-rich, we must impose a roll tax of 15.3 percent on the non-retired. Americans have more pressing uses for 15.3 percent of their wages than subsidizing the summer vacations of the Annenbergs.

My purpose isn't to congratulate the Monthly for its prescience, because the Monthly's "gospel" has changed as dramatically as the establishment's. Originally, the magazine's means-test heresy was part of its endorsement of Milton Fried >;man's idea of a guaranteed income ("Abolish Social

Security," January 1972). Friedman's goal was to eliminate virtually all government benefit programs-not just Social Security but also Aid to Families with Dependent Children (welfare), unemployment compensation, public housing, Medicaid, and farm subsidies-and replace them with one, big means-tested program that gave money to anyone who, for whatever reason, didn't have enough.

The virtue of Friedman's plan was its simplicity. There would be no crazy-qu >;ilt of competing entitlements, no doubledipping, no bureaucratic turf fights, no nosy moralistic social workers asking welfare mothers whether anybody in the house could be working. Wasn't the point of welfare-like Social Security, unemployment compensation and the rest-really just to get checks to people who needed money? Yes, a reed the Month When President Nixon actually proposed a variant of the guaranteed...