NEWS AND VIEWS

The President proposes a means-test for Social Security benefits. That was the big news out of his news conference yesterday, and I think it is significant. Why make this announcement? The President knows that his original proposal, which emphasized private accounts while admitting that alone would not solve the problem, was floundering with the people and Congress alike. He needed to jump-start the debate. He can now claim he has gone a long way towards a total solution and demand the opposition respond. They won't, of course, in any substantive way. The Democrats have decided to take the position that there is no problem with Social Security that can't be fixed with some minor tweaking. It is a terribly irresponsible position to take, but one that will probably be quite effective electorally.

There is a new study that is being touted as the "smoking gun" on human-caused global warming. I'm still skeptical, but even if the emission of greenhouse gases by our growing global economy is causing global warming, even this study admits that we can't stop the process at this point even if we could stop the emissions cold. At some point we are going to have to realize that we cannot stop this process, as no nation on Earth will shut it's economy down, or even slow it down, which is the only way to make a substantial impact on these emissions. We should begin the process of creating strategies to deal with the warming that will likely happen over the rest of this century.

Gerard Baker decries the seemingly unstoppable process of state growth in the UK, with less than a week before the election in that country. It appear Great Britain is headed inexorably again toward the welfare-state that characterizes it's European neighbors, all of which are headed into a demographic crisis that makes our problems look like a walk in the park.