Matt Yglesias

Rose DeLauro Says Budget Conference Won’t Tinker With Social Security

I noted late last week that there was some chance that the conference committee appointed for the 2010 budget was going to attempt some funny business with Social Security. After all, there are indications that Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad extracted a promise to do something with Social Security in exchange for agreeing to reconciliation for health care. And as one of the House conferees they picked Rep. Allen Boyd (D-FL), who was the only Democrat to support Bush’s Social Security privatization plan back in 2005.

Amanda Terkel spoke to Rep. Rosa DeLauro, one of the other conferees, yesterday and she said in reply:

DELAURO: As far as my understanding is concerned, is that there is not going to be any reference to Social Security. Social Security will be a discussion that will come in our overall health care debate, but my understanding is that at the moment, it is not part of the budget conference.

That’s fairly reassuring, though I don’t really understand why Social Security is part of our “overall health care debate.” To look at it generously, if congress were to succeed in putting health care on some kind of sustainable trajectory, it would then be time to talk about how to do you pay for that sustainable trajectory, and perhaps Social Security should be part of that discussion. Thus far, though, I still think it’s far from clear whether or not we’re going to get a sufficiently serious health reform at all and I don’t think that dragging Social Security into the conversation improves those odds.