There is no use in re-inventing the wheel. Therefore, I am merely pointing the way towards a very remarkable piece by Jonathan Cohn. The take-home message is simple: If the individual mandate at the center of the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, then so is the idea of privatizing Social Security. (You’ll have to read Cohn to find out why.) The fact that the GOP is generally in favor of one and opposed to the other, however, means that they’re wrong about one of them. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the Supreme Court will tell us which one it is.
“Not so fast!” interject my conservative friends (yes, I have some) “The Democrats are also in favor of one and opposed to the other. They’re just as hypocritical as the Republicans!” Ah, but you see, only the first part of that sentence is true. The Democrats have never claimed that privatizing Social Security was unconstitutional, they just asserted that it was bad policy. Thus, their different positions on the issues aren’t fundamentally at odds with each other. Think about it.
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February 7, 2011 at 12:42 pm
A great point to focus on…up until now, I had not even thought about the similarity between the two proposals. On a side note, I saw an interesting article in the LA Times yesterday from a Law Prof at Yale. It was an interesting rebuttal to that passed by the Judge in Florida. Not sure, though, how you feel about his response:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-amar-health-care-legal-20110206,0,1370439.story