Ever since the early days of the Bush administration, self-righteous Democrats have prided themselves with the moniker of “the reality-based community”.  The designation was intended to highlight their supposed attachment to the facts as they exist in the real world and their rejection of the unrealistic mandates of ideology and faith.

But when it comes to Social Security, Democrats live in what can only be called Fantasyland.  President Obama cracked open the door to the possibility of Social Security reform, but leading Congressional Democrats are putting the President on notice that they will not tolerate deviation from purist orthodoxy — no cuts in benefits will be tolerated or even considered, regardless of the cost to the dwindling number of workers.  Leading leftist bloggers are marching in lockstep, casually insisting that tax increases necessary to fund continual transfer of wealth from young to old are just fine or that some magic wand of massively increased spending on health care will somehow counteract massively increased spending on Social Security.

The problem here is that money to be spent on Social Security has to come from somewhere and that the tax rates necessary to fund existing entitlement levels without modification would by 2040 impose crippling tax rates of up to 75% on workers to maintain.  These taxes are overwhelmingly regressive — imposed disproportionately on lower-wage workers who pay into a “trust fund” which has virtually no chance of lasting long enough to actually pay back to them.  By refusing to even consider needs-testing or other reductions in entitlements, Democrats are betraying their supposed commitment to the working poor in favor of their political commitment to a group of elderly voters who are either just ignorant of the facts or who selfishly have little concern about the fiscal meltdown that will occur after they are dead and gone.

Young voters who form the core of the Democrats’ emerging permanent majority should consider how Democrats are selling their financial future to continue to dishonestly buy the votes of people on the other end of the age spectrum.  So far, they can get away with this because Republicans have been unable to mount a practical alternative proposal for Social Security and the idea of across-the-board benefit cuts is easy to misrepresent and scare voters with in the blind and lazy pro-entitlement media.  But sound proposals like needs testing deserve consideration, and eventually some Republicans will wake up enough to start putting them forward.  And on that day, Democrats will deserve to lose the support of workers.

UPDATE I: Proving the axiom that statistics can be manipulated to appear to prove anything, Nobel Laurette Paul Krugman says that the increase in Social Security spending won’t really be that much of a problem.  Unfortunately, what Krugman’s blizzard of numbers leaves out is the simple question of where the additional 2% of GDP dedicated to Social Security (and far more for the massive increases in Medicare he calls for) would come from.  Krugman ignores the additional tax load that would be imposed on workers and the depressive effect that continual massive wealth transfers from young to old would have an a weak economic recovery.

When Krugman complains about ideology trumping economic sanity, he should look in a mirror instead of just pointing fingers at Republicans.