Math-deficient Democrats also need to get specific

SAN DIEGO — It's about time. As President Bush continues his 60-city tour to sell Americans on the need to reform Social Security, the administration has set up a "war room" to fight back against those who feel the need to badmouth Bush and his plan every chance they get.

Correction: There isn't a plan per se — only a call for reform. And that makes the manner in which some Democrats are behaving even more distasteful. It is one thing for politicians to take potshots at their opponents and pooh-pooh proposals that might pay dividends with voters. But in the absence of a specific plan of their own, what the Democrats are really doing is trying to discredit the very idea that Social Security needs any reform whatsoever.

That tells me a couple of things. First, some people really do go into politics to avoid math. Democrats are having a lot of difficulty grasping some pretty basic mathematical concepts, not the least of which is that with the impending retirement of more than 76 million baby boomers, it follows that the economic strain on younger workers to support those retirees will be crippling.

Democrats aren't the only ones in the dark. A lot of the people don't get this. I've had boomers tell me that the system is working fine, and that my generation will just have to support them as their generation supported the World War II generation. Easy for them to say.

However, Democrats do seem to understand the concept of political pragmatism. Their attacks on Social Security reform show that they have no compunction about shafting young people. No doubt, that's because young voters have a tendency not to turn out at the polls in the same percentages as other voters, particularly senior citizens. Since they're not proposing any alternative to reform, Democrats are essentially defending the status quo and preserving a situation that, if not rectified, will result in confiscatory tax rates for anyone who has yet to celebrate their 40th birthday.

As a 37-year-old worker and taxpayer, I know when I'm being "dissed." And I don't appreciate my economic well-being, and that of my children, being sacrificed so Democrats can score points with senior citizens, most of whom oppose tinkering with Social Security. And what sense does that make anyway? Under the system of private accounts that the president is talking about, as with most of the proposals being circulated in Washington, Americans 55 and older aren't going to be affected one way or another. They'll be grandfathered into the current system. This whole debate is only about how we handle younger workers.

This week, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said this outright in proposing his own Social Security reform bill. Hagel's plan would allow workers to set up a vol-untary program of personal savings accounts — but it would grant this option only to workers 45 and younger. Hagel also wants to raise the retirement age to 68 because Americans are living longer these days.

The senator from Nebraska deserves credit for having the guts to put something specific on the table. If only others in Congress would do the same, we might get somewhere in this discussion. Ditto for the White House, which also needs to get specific.

Bush should stop describing the current situation as a "crisis" — unless he makes clear what's so critical. It's not the eventual insolvency of the program — which some critics are all too happy to dispute — but rather what young workers have to pay to keep the program solvent. He should also start making the case for other kinds of reforms, instead of sounding like a broken record in promoting private accounts: raising the retirement age; means-testing the program so that millionaires are purged from the rolls; and wage-indexing benefits so that they increase over time at a reasonable rate.

The stakes being what they are, I'm glad there's a war room. I hope this means that the administration is ready to go to battle. And prepared to do it right. If it does it wrong, and keeps making the kind of mistakes it has been making so far in the debate, it could actually harm the larger cause behind reforming Social Security: ensuring even a semblance of generational fairness.

Ruben Navarrette's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com