The History of Social Security and its Future
In the past few years, Social Security reform has been a complicated issue. During the 2004 presidential election, President Bush, the most famous Social Security reformist, was not eager to discuss the issue. With the earliest baby boomers about to retire in 2008, Social Security has come to the forefront of many people’s minds.
Since the issue of privatization of Social Security has not been passed through Congress, and since President Bush and his administration have backed off from making Social Security reforms their top agenda item, it seems as if the containers have succeeded. The opposing group stopped the expanders from gaining enough support to change the status quo. The containers have an easier time than the expanders though, containers only have to do one thing right to stop the expanders, while the expanders need to do everything right.
The containers could have made their tactics even better by offering a counter solution. The opposing group, especially the democrats in Congress could have made their argument against privatizing Social Security even stronger by offering another solution to fixing the problem with Social Security. Since the Democratic Party platform vowed to reform Social Security, they obviously realized that a problem existed.
Therefore they could not deny the problem effectively. Since they could not deny the problem, they should have put forth an alternate solution. Social Security reform is bound to come up again since the problem still exists. But for now the democrats in Congress and other groups have succeeded in issue containment.
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