WASHINGTON — President Bush used his State of the Union address Wednesday to launch a determined push for sweeping changes in the nation's Social Security system, including new individual investment accounts for younger workers and potentially deep but unspecified cuts in benefits for future retirees.
In his first full-scale exposition of the issue he has made the top domestic priority of his second term, Bush argued that Social Security, the 70-year-old pension system that long had been the federal government's most popular program, was in declining financial health and needed to be changed.
"We must pass reforms that solve the financial problems of Social Security once and for all," the president said in his 53-minute speech.
But Bush did not spell out how he would avert the financial shortfall that the government expected to arrive in 2042. Instead, he asked Congress to consider a list of politically difficult changes, including cutting benefits for wealthy retirees, increasing the retirement age and changing the formula by which cost-of-living increases in Social Security were calculated.
"All of these ideas are on the table," Bush said. He noted that many of those options had been raised by leading Democrats in the past -- although he avoided endorsing any of them himself.
The speech, Bush's first State of the Union address of his second term, marked a significant political moment: a Republican president reelected with a majority of the popular vote supported by solid GOP majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time since President McKinley's second term began in 1901.
Bush proposed an ambitious and wide-ranging agenda -- so wide-ranging that many of his major priorities, such as changes in federal tax law, the civil lawsuit system and immigration policy, rated only two sentences. Dozens of lesser goals were barely mentioned.
The president noted that he was speaking only three days after millions of Iraqis had voted in elections for a national legislature, an event he cited as evidence that his policy of promoting democracy in the Middle East was making progress. He rejected suggestions that the United States should set a timetable for withdrawing its 150,000 troops from Iraq, saying "that would embolden the terrorists and make them believe they can wait us out."
But the largest and most significant portion of the speech was devoted to proposed changes in Social Security, the issue Bush repeatedly has named as the top domestic priority of his second term.
