Mr. Clinton's backbone.

"We don't need to tamper with Social Security... We're not going to fool with Social Security. It's solid. It's secure. It's sound."

--Bill Clinton, Macon, Ga., September 1, 1992

Clinton Considers Curb on Social Security Cost-ofLiving Raises --Washington Post, January 29, 1993

Social Security Won't Be Subject to Freeze, White House Decides New York Times, February 9, 1993

WE ARE are less surprised at the spectacle of President Clinton's lips moving than at the cause: a momentary display of backbone about the coming Social Security crack-up. We salute this unexpected--though, alas, brief--development. Particularly since there was never much chance that the various mooted proposals--limiting cost-of-living increases, raising the retirement age, taxing Social Security benefits more heavily for all but the poor--would actually get through the Democratic Congress.

Social Security is of course a fraud, an intergenerational Ponzi scheme that will inevitably shortchange the younger taxpayers now financing it. Simple arithmetic indicates that by 2030, just to pay the Social Security and Medicare benefits promised under current law, payroll taxes will have to rise from today's terrible 15.3 per cent to an utterly impossible 37. And the related Medicare trust fund is expected to be insolvent as early as 2002.

Indeed, what seems to have caught the Clinton Administration's attention is the burden of benefits right now. Overall, the Federal Government's spending is projected to climb to almost 24 per cent of Gross National Product in 1993. The federal deficit will reach 6 per cent of GNP. Over half of that federal spending consists of congressionally mandated "entitlements," of which Social Security and Medicare constitute the greater part. Unless these are attacked directly, federal fingers will continue to tighten around the economy's windpipe-or, to put it another way, liberals will find it increasingly hard to raise money for more selective vote-buying.

Any additional money taxed out of higher-income Social Security recipients will, of course, be wasted. And taxing Social Security will have a further unfortunate effect: increasing the disincentives that have been driving 65- to 70-year-olds out of the workforce. Working at that age carries a triple penalty: benefits are reduced, income tax has to be paid, and the payroll levy kicks in all over again.

Sorting out the Social Security shambles must involve emancipating the energetic elderly. Former Senator William Armstrong used regularly to propose abolishing the limitation on retiree earnings, as well as gradually raising the age of eligibility for benefits. But, as he pointed out when NR contacted him in his self-imposed exile in Denver, the last chance for real reform was lost during the Reagan Administration because Democratic demagogues turned Social Security into what they gloatingly used to call a "live-rail issue."

Well, it's their live rail now. And, fleetingly, Bill Clinton's backbone.