5.11.00
No Pain, Cap Gains

5.10.00
Tommy Thompson's Blunder

5.09.00
Federalist Society

5.08.00
Florida Not Preferred

5.05.00 4 p.m.
Tony Coelho, Soft On Crime

5.05.00 8 a.m.
Gallant Effort

5.02.00
Are You Experienced?

5.01.00
Not Quite Wright

4.28.00
Gay Marriage: Coming To Vermont

4.27.00
Hillary and Elian

n talking about reforming Social Security, George W. Bush wants to avoid details and stick to broad principles. There are a lot of reasons for this preference, but it's fair to say that the most important is political: Bush doesn't want to be attacked for any benefit cuts that might be necessary to pay for privatization (such as raising the retirement age or reducing cost-of-living adjustments). Al Gore's charge that Bush has a "secret plan" to privatize Social Security is designed to force Bush to spell out the painful details.

But there's no reason that privatization needs to be "paid for" at all. Privatization doesn't increase the system's liabilities, it just shifts them around in time. If you believe that introducing personal investment options to Social Security would increase national wealth-and Martin Feldstein of Harvard's low estimate of the present value of future gains is $10 trillion-then the shift actually saves money.

The question of whether Bush should include benefit cuts of some sort, then, is a purely political one: Would he rather deal with the potentially huge fallout from proposing cuts, or toothless criticism from Gore, the Washington Post, and the Concord Coalition about his irresponsibility for not proposing them? To ask is to answer.

Bush-Fitzgerald
In all the speculation about who Gov. Bush will pick for his running mate, one name that hasn't come up is Peter Fitzgerald, the Republican senator from Illinois. It should. Fitzgerald is a pro-life Irish-Catholic from a crucial swing state. The Democrats appear to be considering Dick Durbin, the other senator from Illinois and a Catholic who has almost as low a national profile as Fitzgerald. (Having moved from supporting the Human Life Amendment to supporting partial-birth abortion in a span of six years, Durbin should make a perfect match for Gore.) Conservatives would have concerns about some of Fitzgerald's votes since joining the Senate in 1999-but then consider the alternatives, and stifle them.

Rainforest Crunch
For fans of left-wing infighting, the current issue of The Nation is a treat. It pits — you're going to love this — Vice President Gore against a poor South American Indian tribe.

At the center of the clash is Occidental Petroleum, a company that wants to drill for oil in a region of Colombia inhabited by the U'wa tribe. Occidental has old ties to the Gore family and has received Clinton-administration backing in its struggle with the Indians. The dispute is literally a matter of life and death for the U'wa, writes Ken Silverstein: "Tribal leaders say the U'was will commit collective suicide if Occidental is allowed to drill on their land. That may not be an idle threat. According to tribal lore, thousands of U'was jumped off a cliff in the seventeenth century in order to avoid submitting to the Spanish crown."

Perhaps they can wear Gore 2000 t-shirts on the way down. Almost every year, Occidental hands Gore a $20,000 check for mining rights on land Gore owns in Tennessee, even though the company has never actually done any mining there. And Gore's family owns Occidental shares worth at least $250,000. There is, in fact, a long history of mutual back-scratching between Gore and his father, on the one hand, and Occidental's deceased founder, Armand Hammer, on the other. (Hammer, as the Nation does not mention, had an uncomfortably close relationship with the Soviets.)

Read the full account.

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