As the Washington Post reported last week, a group of 15 people at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces recently determined that the U.S.’s still fragile economy is the biggest threat to U.S. national security.
Sensible.
The group’s proposed solutions, though, are strange, as they are primarily geared toward “constrain[ing] entitlements growth,” focusing specifically on Social Security and Medicare. For Social Security, they advise tying benefits growth to prices rather than to wages, eliminating the $106,800 payroll tax cap, increasing the retirement age to 69, and switching to a “means testing” Social Security sytem that allocates lower payments for those with more wealth. For Medicare, they advise rasing payroll taxes for Medicare A, raising premiums for Medicare B, and introducing more “means testing.”
The solutions are not themselves strange. But why the focus on Social Security and Medicare? Why not highlight the importance of fixing the financial system? Why not focus on… you know… military programs that could be cut? Or, to take a cue from James Fallows, why not focus on infrastructure? Or why not focus on constitutional reform. To quote Fallows at length:
When the U.S. Senate was created, the most populous state, Virginia, had 10 times as many people as the least populous, Delaware. Giving them the same two votes in the Senate was part of the intricate compromise over regional, economic, and slave-state/free-state interests that went into the Constitution. Now the most populous state, California, has 69 times as many people as the least populous, Wyoming, yet they have the same two votes in the Senate. A similarly inflexible business organization would still have a major Whale Oil Division; a military unit would be mainly fusiliers and cavalry. No one would propose such a system in a constitution written today, but without a revolution, it’s unchangeable. Similarly, since it takes 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster on controversial legislation, 41 votes is in effect a blocking minority. States that together hold about 12 percent of the U.S. population can provide that many Senate votes. This converts the Senate from the “saucer” George Washington called it, in which scalding ideas from the more temperamental House might “cool,” into a deep freeze and a dead weight.
The group was clearly thinking outside the box on national security. However, after shattering that first box, they erected another box, ultimately thinking rather narrowly about solutions.
