Fixes to save entitlements are easy. It's finding a politician with a backbone that's hard

Willis Robertson was born in Martinsburg, W.Va., on May 27, 1887. Two weeks later, Harry Byrd was born to a family that lived just a few blocks away. Both men would grow up to become U.S. senators from the state of Virginia.

Both also had famous kin: Robertson’s son Pat became a televangelist, while Byrd’s brother Richard was credited with being the first to reach the North Pole.

Both senators were Democrats as Democrats were understood in the mid-20th-century South. That meant they were strict segregationists and opponents to varying degrees of FDR’s New Deal, a societal sea change that rewrote great swaths of American public policy.

From the moment of its passage, conservative politicians have worked to overturn the New Deal, which they believed violated the Constitution, which contained not a whisper about old-age pensions, civilized worker conditions or interference in commodity markets.

Even today, a strain of conservatism, with an almost genetic roboticism, is working to return to the year 1933 and unravel those first threads of modern liberalism. This is difficult work, because most Americans appreciate cheap food, they do not wish to be crushed under a piece of heavy machinery and they want a guaranteed income in retirement.

So frontal assaults being political career killers, entitlement foes have looked for back-door ways to chip away at Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Florida’s Sen. Rick Scott called for a re-authorization of all government programs every five years, which everyone immediately recognized as an attempt to decimate entitlements.

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It was all too easy to envision congressional Republicans holding entitlements hostage, just as they have been intent on holding the debt ceiling hostage — only agreeing to re-authorize Social Security on the condition of massive cuts.

Even Sen. Mitch McConnell, the leader of Senate Republicans, washed his hands of it, saying this was a Rick Scott plan, not a GOP plan.

Then came the coup de gras at President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, where the old man, proving himself more mentally agile than kids half his age, maneuvered congressional Republicans into a corner where they actually stood up and cheered his demand that Social Security and Medicare not be touched.

So this method having failed, anti-entitlement forces have turned the clock back to 2008, replaying all the greatest hits of deficit doomsaying and budgetary austerity. It’s not that they want to cut Social Security and Medicare, it’s that we can’t afford not to. They have whispered this refrain in the ears of any media agent who will listen and dutifully file a sober and responsible-sounding piece on the entitlement funding “crisis” and the urgency of getting debt and deficit spending under control.

Mike Pence has led the charge, telling CNBC that, “We got a $32 trillion national debt right now, (and) having a national debt the same size as our nation’s economy is unsustainable.”

Nice of Pence to get religion now, but he might have thought of it sooner, when the Trump-Pence administration was adding nearly $8.2 trillion, yes trillion, to the national debt itself.

But of course, that was different. Deficit spending is only bad when Democrats do it.

Forty years ago we were warned — and it made sense — that the baby boomer generation and its great wave of retirees would bankrupt Social Security and Medicare. That argument is still being used today, no matter that this ship has largely sailed.

The greatest wave of post-war babies have reached Medicare age, and in that time the prospects for Medicare solvency have actually improved. In 2009, the Congressional Budget Office was projecting that by mid-century, Medicare would represent 11% of GDP; today, that projection has declined to less than 6%.

Indeed, the only thing that anti-New Dealers seem to hate worse than entitlements are the solutions that make entitlements sustainable. Medicare is in better shape in part because Obamacare reduced health care costs. Even with that, American medical care costs far more than other developed nation, without any corresponding improvement in care.

Certainly, far more costs could be taken out of the system, but this solution for long-term Medicare sustainability is an anathema to politicians whose own wallets are fattened by the Big Medicine lobby.

So, too, could Social Security be bucked up by welcoming a generation of desperately needed immigrant workers who would pay into the system, as they always did before the GOP turned immigration into a toxic issue. And, of course, if conservatives are genuinely worried about our national solvency, they could always revisit Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy, which added so much to today’s debt.

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We have always heard about “hard fixes” needed to save entitlements. No, the fixes are easy. Finding strong leaders who will enact these fixes is what’s hard.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Republicans try to chip away at entitlements, instead of fixing them