One almost feels sorry for President Bush. Just as he's trying to make his "ownership society" look like something even Franklin Roosevelt would endorse, an event comes along that makes it look more like something Cal Worthington would hawk on late-night TV.
The event is a Bankruptcy Court judge's ruling last week allowing United Airlines to dump its underfunded pension plan on the federal government. The move may mean cuts in pension benefits for some United employees of roughly 50%.
It's pointless to debate the circumstances that brought United to this pass. The older airlines are the sick men of American industry, saddled with heavy costs -- including employee compensation packages -- while nimbler, cheaper carriers deliver service as good, or better. It's a fair bet that other legacy airlines, such as Delta and US Airways, will soon join in rendering full pension benefits for their employees as much a relic of the past as chateaubriand in tourist class. Automakers and aerospace companies may not be far behind.
This is where Bush's "ownership society" falls short. As the president describes it, the "ownership society" sounds like a pretty sweet deal. We'll own our retirement savings, through individual Social Security accounts, and our healthcare, through medical savings accounts. We'll also own our home, or whatever sliver of equity we could afford.
But as the economist Robert J. Schiller wrote in a recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Bush's proposals "don't just encourage personal ownership -- they also increase personal risk." Risk is the one thing, he notes, that U.S. workers already have too much of. Workers are changing jobs more often and spending longer periods out of work, earning wages that are growing at slower rates than at any time in recent memory, while paying for more of their healthcare and retirement themselves.
The social safety net that Bush is trying to destroy, by privatizing Social Security among other steps, was the product of a sea change in the American understanding of the individual's place in the economy. In the 1930s, the evidence became inescapable that economic conditions could render people winners or losers without regard to their personal effort or character.
The government responded with Social Security. Roosevelt, whose humaneness Bush so casually denigrated in his astonishingly ignorant speech about Yalta last week, remarked during the 1940 Democratic National Convention upon the "war against poverty and suffering and ill-health and insecurity" then being waged by the government, "a war in which all classes are joining in the interest of a sound and enduring democracy."
