SUNDAY, APRIL 11, 2010
GEORGE F. WILL
the prairie: If an earthquake occurs in Illinois and no one notices, is it really a seis- mic event? Gov. Pat Quinn called it a “political earth-
Pensioner nation
A
puzzle from Philosophy 101: If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? A puzzle from
quake” when the state’s legislature recently voted — by margins of 92 to 17 in the House and 48 to 6 in the Senate — to reform pen- sions for state employees. There is now a cap on the amount of earnings that can be used as the basis for calculating benefits. In some states, employees game the system by “spiking” their last year’s earnings by accu- mulating vast amounts of overtime pay. An even more important change — a har-
binger of America’s future — is that most new Illinois state government employees must work until age 67 to be eligible for full retirement benefits. Those already on the state payroll can still retire at 55 with full benefits. The 1935 Social Security Act established 65 as the age of eligibility for payouts. But welfare state politics quickly becomes a bid- ding war, enriching the menu of benefits, so Congress in 1956 entitled women to collect benefits at 62 and in 1961 extended the enti- tlement to men. Today, nearly half of Social Security recipients choose to begin getting benefits at 62. This is a grotesque perversion of a program that was never intended to subsidize retirees for a third to a half of their adult lives. It also reflects the decadent dependence
that the welfare state encourages: Because of the displacement of responsibility from the individual to government, 48 percent of workers over 55 have total savings and in- vestments of less than $50,000. Because most states’ pension plans com- pute their present values — and minimize required current contributions — by assum- ing an unrealistic 8 percent annual return on investments, the cumulative funding gap of state pensions already may be $3 trillion and certainly is rising. For example, Wednesday’s New York Times contained this attention-seizing bulletin: “An inde- pendent analysis of California’s three big pension funds has found a hidden shortfall of more than half a trillion dollars, several times the amount reported by the funds and more than six times the value of the state’s outstanding bonds.” It is not news that Cali-
DAVID S. BRODER
Next: How to pay the bills
W
ith every passing day, it is becoming clearer that next year the issue of paying for the government will be
back at the center of political debate. There will be a head start on the dis-
cussion this summer or fall, because some of the expiring Bush tax cuts must be extended. But the hangover from the Great Recession and the lagging unemployment numbers will make it impossible to focus on improv- ing the Internal Revenue Code. Come 2011, however, the demand to start dealing seriously with the overhang of def- icits and debt threatening the nation’s future will become irresistible. Whether we like it or not, we have been warned. On Tuesday, Paul Volcker, former chair- man of the Federal Reserve Board, told a New York audience that the time is coming when new taxes will have to be considered. “If at the end of the day, we need to raise tax- es, we should raise taxes,” he said. On Wednesday in Dallas, Ben Bernanke, who now holds the same job, said: “Inevita- bly, addressing the fiscal challenges posed by an aging population will require a willing- ness to make difficult choices. The arithme- tic is, unfortunately, quite clear. To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medi- care, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.” The next day, at a breakfast with reporters
in Washington, Douglas Elmendorf, the head of the Congressional Budget Office, confirmed that his economists have begun studying how to write a value-added tax, a form of national sales tax, because of grow- ing congressional interest in drafting such a measure.
Elmendorf reminded the journalists of the
grim news contained in his agency’s analysis of President Obama’s budget proposals. Agreeing with Bernanke that the current course is “unsustainable,” he said that unless something changes, the government will
KLMNO
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DAVID IGNATIUS
fornia is America’s home-grown Greece, but the condition of the three funds, which serve 2.6 million current and retired public employees, is going to exacerbate the state’s decline by requiring significantly higher taxpayer contributions. A recent debate on “Fox News Sunday” il-
lustrated the differences between the few politicians who are, and the many who are not, willing to face facts. Marco Rubio, the former speaker of Florida’s House of Repre- sentatives who is challenging Gov. Charles Crist for the Republican U.S. Senate nomi- nation, made news by stating the obvious. Asked how the nation might address the
projected $17.5 trillion in unfunded Social Security liabilities, Rubio said that we should consider two changes for people 10 or more years from retirement. One would raise the retirement age. The other would alter the calculation of benefits: Indexing them to inflation rather than wage increases would substantially reduce the system’s un- funded liabilities. Neither idea startles any serious person. But Crist, with the reflex of the unreflective, rejected both and said that he would fix So- cial Security by eliminating “waste” and “fraud,” of which there is little. The system’s problems are the result not of incompetent administration but of improvident promis- es made by Congress. Synthetic indignation being the first ref-
uge of political featherweights, Crist’s cam- paign announced that he believes Rubio’s suggestions are “cruel, unusual and unfair to seniors living on a fixed income.” They are indeed unusual, because flinching from the facts of the coming entitlements crisis is the default position of all but a responsible few, such as Wisconsin’s Rep. Paul Ryan, who has endorsed Rubio. What is ultimately cruel is Crist’s unserious pretense that America faces only palatable choices and that im- provident promises can be fully funded with money currently lost to waste and fraud. By the time the baby boomers have re- tired in 2030, the median age of the Amer- ican population will be close to that of to- day’s population of Florida, the retirees’ ha- ven that is Heaven’s antechamber. The 38-year-old Rubio’s responsible answer to a serious question gives the nation a glimpse of a rarity — a brave approach to the welfare state’s inevitable politics of gerontocracy.
georgewill@washpost.com
Biden’s optimism about Iraq
ice President Biden didn’t use the jinxed phrase “mission ac- complished.” But he offered an optimistic assessment of Iraq after last month’s parliamentary election, saying that Iran’s covert bid for influ- ence there had been “clobbered” and that Baghdad appears headed toward an “inclusive” coalition government. “Politics has finally broken out in
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Iraq,” Biden said in an interview Thursday. “Everyone is in on the deal, and it’s real.” Biden’s upbeat comments came
days after a new wave of attacks raised fears that Iraq might be slip- ping back toward sectarian violence. His staff proposed the interview in an effort to counter these worries and to show where U.S. “red lines” are drawn in this delicate post-election period.
Biden said he has “made it clear to
RAHEB HOMAVANDI/REUTERS
Afghan President Hamid Karzai speaks in Tehran on March 27.
KATHLEEN PARKER
The Karzai complex
Afghanistan’s leader needs a Khalilzad
aging Dr. Khalilzad. That is, Zalmay Khalilzad, former U.S. ambassador to Af- ghanistan and now a wandering consultant on all things Afghan and Middle Eastern. Might we impose on him one more time? Khalilzad is not a physician, but to the extent that he has apparent healing powers, he is a doctor of di- plomacy. He came to mind unavoid- ably in recent days, as Afghan Presi- dent Hamid Karzai seemed to be sporting a lighted fuse from the top of his jaunty Persian lamb cap. First Karzai accused the West and
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emerge from the Obama years spending an amount equivalent to 25 percent of the gross domestic product while taking in revenue equal to only 19 percent of the GDP. Closing the gap “can’t be solved through minor changes,” he said. Revenue projected under current laws would barely be suffi- cient to pay for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, defense and interest on the nation- al debt. Everything else would depend on finding new revenue — or borrowing. This is the reality that will face the new fis- cal responsibility commission, created by Obama’s executive order after Senate Re- publicans led the fight against legislation that would have established a similar panel. That bipartisan commission may struggle this year for sufficient agreement to send its recommendations on to Congress for a vote, but it will certainly narrow and focus the de- bate for next year. Some Senate Republicans greeted last
week’s hints of coming tax hikes with pre- dictable grumbling, as if they had nothing to do with creating the deficits in the years when they were authorizing wars and cut- ting tax rates. But the good news is that retiring Sen.
Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the senior Republican member of the Budget Commit- tee, is setting a good example for his party by teaming up with Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, always the most bipartisan of Democrats, on a bill that could become a model for next year. Rather than raising taxes, it reforms them in the interest of simplification and fairness, lowering the overall rates in most cases while eliminating loopholes. That kind of approach has not been taken since the tax bill of 1986, a collaboration of Republicans Ronald Reagan, James Baker, Dick Darman and Bob Packwood with Democrats led by Bill Bradley. The forces converging to make taxes a top
agenda item in 2011 can also make it a year of opportunity — if legislators and the presi- dent step up.
davidbroder@washpost.com
the United Nations of orchestrating the voter fraud with which his own followers have been charged. Next he blustered that if foreign occupi- ers didn’t start showing a little more respect, well, he just might join the Taliban himself.
One is inclined initially to hope
that this, like all tantrums, will pass as the mood changes or as other dis- tractions prevail. Parental patience is indeed called for, but ancient wis- dom may be more to the point. The sort of wisdom that perhaps only a fellow Afghan can bring to the din- ner table of a man who is under siege, exhausted and obviously emo- tionally strained. Whatever his flaws, Karzai has reason for his pique. Lately he has become a target of everyone from Barack Obama, who came out swinging even on the campaign trail, to European parliamentarians. Add to those strains external pres- sures from the Taliban and Iran, and you have a formula for meltdown. It’s deal-cutting time for Karzai, and with whom he deals may well depend on how the Obama adminis- tration treats him. The consensus from Kabul is that Obama can treat Karzai firmly in private but with respect in public. This has not always been the case. Karzai still stings, I’m told, from a formal dinner in 2008 when then- Sen. Joe Biden threw down his nap- kin, pushed back his chair and left the room. Relations with the Obama administration began badly when Karzai learned indirectly from a po- litical rival whom the new U.S. am- bassador would be, rather than from the secretary of state or sitting am- bassador, as is customary. Perceived hostility from special envoy Richard Holbrooke has been a constant rub. The corruption targeted by Oba-
ma, Holbrooke and others isn’t in dispute. Voter fraud can’t be tolerat- ed. But Karzai’s problems are sys- temic rather than personal. Wheth- er Karzai deserves our respect is sec-
POST PARTISAN
Excerpts from The Post’s opinion blog, updated daily at washingtonpost.com/postpartisan
CHARLES LANE
Reasons to miss Stevens
My admiration for Justice John Paul Ste- vens has relatively little to do with the conclusions he reached, since I probably agreed with him only about half the time. What I appreciate was his approach to his job and public life.
First, on a hardworking court, no one
worked harder or more efficiently. Much has been made of the fact that Stevens has spent so much of his time in sunny Flori- da of late. But Stevens is, simply put, a master at organizing his time and hus- banding his energy so as to give taxpayers the maximum value of the salary they paid him. He and his law clerks reviewed
each petition that came to the court, rath- er than rely on a memo from the clerk “pool” as most of the other justices do. He wrote the first draft of his opinions and prepared meticulously for oral argument, as was evident from the precision and fre- quency of his questions from the bench. His level of effort would have been im- pressive in a far younger man. From someone in his 80s, it was pretty incred- ible.
Second, Stevens epitomized judicial
temperament. At oral argument, he posed even the most challenging questions po- litely and in even tones. He enjoyed a good laugh and never seemed to take him- self or the court too seriously. His written opinions generally refrained from grand- standing. Even his well-known dissent in Bush v. Gore seemed more sorrowful than angry. As the court moved right and Stevens
moved left, he frequently found himself in dissent — including lone dissent. Justice Antonin Scalia has often gone out of his way to dispute a point that Stevens had made. But as far as I can tell, Stevens nev- er let professional disagreements with colleagues become personal — though I suspect the rivalry with Scalia taxed his tolerance to the limit. When Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist died in 2005, Ste- vens mourned him as a close friend de- spite the fact that Rehnquist had rarely been on Stevens’s side in cases. When President George W. Bush nominated John Roberts to replace Rehnquist, Ste- vens openly welcomed a man who was conservative but whose abilities and char- acter Stevens admired. In a famous First Amendment case, Ste- vens puzzled many liberals by joining the court’s conservatives in supporting a ban on burning the American flag. His opin-
ion showed that, to this World War II vet- eran, country trumped all other considerations. As the author of opinions upholding the constitutional rights of prisoners at Guantanamo, Stevens surely could understand why someone might want to launch a radical protest against U.S. government policy, but as an in- stinctively polite, respectful and patriotic person, the jurist seemingly couldn’t bring himself to accept a protest as delib- erately coarse and provocative as flag- burning. He embraced many causes and stood for many ideals, but what united them all was his belief in what the flag symbolizes: We are all Americans, and we are entitled to respectful, fair treatment from our gov- ernment and from each other, regardless of our disagreements. Finding someone to bring the same civility to the court is going to be a tall order indeed.
ondary to whether we need him to be effective as president of his coun- try. Given the circumstances, wouldn’t it be wiser to support Kar- zai rather than further cause him to feel impotent? Obama’s recent meeting, off the record and away from cameras, may have helped as a gesture of coopera- tion. But reports from inside Af- ghanistan via my own sources are that Karzai felt lectured to. We all know the feeling. Enter Khalilzad, who was ambas- sador from 2003 to 2005, a relative Golden Age for U.S.-Karzai rela- tions. What was different then was that Khalilzad kept the bad guys at bay and helped Karzai stay focused. Khalilzad told me that he and Kar- zai dined together six nights a week during his diplomatic tenure. Alas, Khalilzad did too good a job and was sent to Iraq in 2005 with orders to find another Karzai. George W. Bush’s subsequent week- ly videoconferences apparently were no substitute for Khalilzad’s magic. It seems clear that the emotional and psychological support that pro- tected Karzai from his own demons — and from the several flaming swords he was trying to juggle — was withdrawn to the detriment of his leadership and our mission. Our official thinking now seems to be to bypass Karzai and manage the counterinsurgency on the dis- trict level. Experts disagree on whether this is workable, but a con- sensus surely would form around the better option of operating in co- operation with a legitimate sitting government. Meanwhile, our own expectations
bear tweaking. Afghanistan won’t become a thriving democracy any- time soon, but, as Jeff Gedmin, president of Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, notes, it can become a nation with a modicum of respect for human rights and the rule of law. The rebuilding and, in some cases, the creation of institutions is un- derway. Enormous progress has been made in a relatively short time, considering what life was like under the Taliban.
Our mission remains to prevent Afghanistan from once again be- coming a haven for terrorists, an achievable goal if our military is suc- cessful in emasculating, if not de- feating, the Taliban. Karzai can be helpful in that pursuit, but, like all of us, he could use a good shrink. Shouldn’t the White House be paging Khalilzad?
kathleenparker@washpost.com
everyone involved” that the United States believes the March 7 election was fair and opposes any illegitimate effort to overturn the result. He said that next year the United States will still have up to 50,000 troops in Iraq “that will be able to shoot straight” and it would consider any govern- ment request for help if major sectar- ian violence were to resume. The vice president is always enthu- siastic, and Thursday’s conversation was no exception, with Biden hitting all the positive “talking points.” But he also offered some detailed evi- dence that Iraqi politicians are con- verging toward some form of coali- tion government.
Biden began by discussing the three bloody attacks that have taken place this month. He said that at least two were the work of remnants of al- Qaeda in Iraq, but that this group’s “capacity is significantly diminished” and that it is failing in its goal “to set the sectarian spark again” and dis- rupt the formation of a government. The al-Qaeda attacks have prodded
the Iraqi government to “keep the foot on the pedal” against the terror- ist threat, Biden said. The tempo of daily counterterrorism operations in- creased last week to a dozen or so, compared with one or two a day just after the election. The Iraqis have also agreed to share more intelli- gence with the United States. As for Iran’s bid for influence, Bi- den was emphatic in arguing that it had failed. He disclosed that Tehran had spent up to $100 million to back the Shiite religious parties and sub- vert the Iraqiya bloc, a secular Sunni- Shiite alliance headed by Ayad Alla- wi, the former prime minister. Bol- stered by a strong Sunni turnout, Iraqiya ended up winning the largest number of seats. “It was a real stick in the eye of the
Iranians,” Biden said of Tehran’s un- successful campaign to steer the elec- tion outcome. What’s more, he said, Tehran’s post-election effort to pres- sure Iraqi leaders who visited Tehran “has turned out to backfire.” Iraqi politicians had discovered “there’s a real price to be paid . . . if it looks like you are seeking the approval or fol- lowing the direction of the Iranians or any neighbor.” Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and some other Shiite politicians had initially indicated that they would challenge the election results. But Bi- den noted that according to a new U.S. poll, 80 percent of Iraqis thought the voting was fair. Those opposing a recount now include two key Shiite leaders, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and Ammar al-Hakim, head of the Is- lamic Supreme Council of Iraq, known as ISCI. Biden said that “it’s necessary for
Iraq” to have a broad coalition gov- ernment that draws together the ma- jor ethnic groups and parties. He pre- dicted that major cabinet positions would be divided among Iraqiya, ISCI, the Kurdish parties and Maliki’s “State of Law” coalition. “Everything we are getting back from all the par- ties acknowledges that it should in- clude all four,” he said. Biden refused to take sides regard- ing who should be the next prime minister. He praised Allawi as “the guy who reached across Sunni and Shiite,” but he also credited Maliki for refusing to join an all-Shiite coalition before the election. He also had kind words for ISCI and the Kurdish parties. The trickiest question for an Oba- ma administration that campaigned on a program of withdrawal from Iraq is how to stay active there, even as American troops come home by the end of next year. Biden said that question comes up in nearly every conversation he has with Iraqis — “Now you guys are sticking, right?” “We plan on staying engaged,” Bi- den said he told Maliki last week — especially in the non-military areas that the United States hopes will part of a stable, long-term relationship. The paradox of Iraq is that to get out successfully, the United States must show that it’s still involved for now. The vice president’s comments send the right signal.
davidignatius@washpost.com
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