Damn the New York Times and its bleeping subscription wall — everybody should read Bob Herbert’s column today. I’ll quote some of it.

[Update: I see that the entire column has been posted by the Tennessee Guerilla Women. I appreciate this, but sooner or later the New York Times will send lawyers and make them stop.]

Americans are shopping while Iraq burns.

The competing television news images on the morning after Thanksgiving were of the unspeakable carnage in Sadr City — where more than 200 Iraqi civilians were killed by a series of coordinated car bombs — and the long lines of cars filled with holiday shopping zealots that jammed the highway approaches to American malls that had opened for business at midnight. …

… There is something terribly wrong with this juxtaposition of gleeful Americans with fistfuls of dollars storming the department store barricades and the slaughter by the thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including old people, children and babies. The war was started by the U.S., but most Americans feel absolutely no sense of personal responsibility for it.

Representative Charles Rangel recently proposed that the draft be reinstated, suggesting that politicians would be more reluctant to take the country to war if they understood that their constituents might be called up to fight. What struck me was not the uniform opposition to the congressman’s proposal — it has long been clear that there is zero sentiment in favor of a draft in the U.S. — but the fact that it never provoked even the briefest discussion of the responsibilities and obligations of ordinary Americans in a time of war.

What frustrated me was that even some people who acknowledged Rangel’s basic purpose responded with ponderous explanations of why a volunteer army is better than a conscripted army. Of course it is. That’s not the point.

Rangel’s point is that the burden of fighting the war is falling disproportionately on poorer Americans than richer ones. Whether the draft is the way to make things equitable is debatable, however. As Katha Pollitt writes,

Supporters of the draft are using it to promote indirectly politics we should champion openly and up front. It’s terrible that working-class teenagers join the Army to get college funds, or job training, or work–what kind of nation is this where Jessica Lynch had to invade Iraq in order to fulfill her modest dream of becoming an elementary school teacher and Shoshanna Johnson had to be a cook on the battlefield to qualify for a culinary job back home? But the solution isn’t to force more people into the Army, it’s affordable education and good jobs for all. Nobody should have to choose between risking her life–or as we see in Abu Ghraib, her soul–and stocking shelves at Wal-Mart. By the same token, threatening our young with injury, madness and death is a rather roundabout way to increase resistance to military adventures. I’d rather just loudly insist that people who favor war go fight in it themselves or be damned as showboaters and shirkers. I’m sure the Army can find something for Christopher Hitchens to do.

To me, however, the point is not about equitably sharing the burden of fighting. The point is that there’s something obscenely decadent about a nation that can perpetrate a war outside its borders as casually as you might order pizza.

Herbert continues,

With no obvious personal stake in the war in Iraq, most Americans are indifferent to its consequences. …

… This indifference is widespread. It enables most Americans to go about their daily lives completely unconcerned about the atrocities resulting from a war being waged in their name. While shoppers here are scrambling to put the perfect touch to their holidays with the purchase of a giant flat-screen TV or a PlayStation 3, the news out of Baghdad is of a society in the midst of a meltdown.

I say the draft is not enough. In fact, I’ve thought up a whole new way to get the nation to pay attention to what it’s perpetrating — The Civilian War Footing Act. The Act’s provisions would kick in automatically whenever U.S. troops are involved in a military action lasting more than 30 days or in which even one U.S. soldier, marine, or sailor has died.

The Civilian War Footing Act could reinstate the draft, whether it’s needed or not. The military could choose not to accept any conscripts it really doesn’t need or want, but perhaps we could require that conscripts at least report for a physical. Make ’em think about it, in other words. But here are the more important provisions:

Gas rationing would kick in automatically, needed or not; anyone who burns more than a tank a week is going to have to be inconvenienced. Taxes would increase across the board to pay for the war’s actual cost. On top of that, at least one hour of prime-time television programming would be pre-empted every evening for either war news or a bond drive telethon. This pre-emption would be random, so that you’d never know if your favorite program will be on or not.

Every citizen between the age of 18 and 75 (not already in the military or subject to the military draft) would be subject to a national lottery. The “winners” would be required to report for duty at a military hospital to care for the wounded, or unload and accompany coffins to the soldier’s families. The period of service could be short — two to four weeks –but no exemptions except for serious health issues would be allowed. Only a small part of the civilian population would ever be called, but the fact that it could happen to anyone ought to weigh on peoples’ minds.

(I thought about using voter registration rolls for the lottery, but decided that might discourage voting. The patriotic duty deadbeats who don’t even bother to vote ought not be given a pass.)

The purpose of the Civilian War Footing Act is to be a big, fat, stinky foot in civilian faces: Pay attention. There’s a war going on in your name and with your implied consent. Are you OK with this?

Bob Herbert continues,

Iraq burns. We shop. The Americans dying in Iraq are barely mentioned in the press anymore. They warrant may be one sentence in a long roundup article out of Baghdad, or a passing reference — no longer than a few seconds — in a television news account of the latest political ditherings.

Since the vast majority of Americans do not want anything to do with the military or the war, the burden of fighting has fallen on a small cadre of volunteers who are being sent into the war zone again and again. Nearly 3,000 have been killed, and many thousands more have been maimed.

The war has now lasted as long as the American involvement in World War II. But there is no sense of collective sacrifice in this war, no shared burden of responsibility. The soldiers in Iraq are fighting, suffering and dying in a war in which there are no clear objectives and no end in sight, and which a majority of Americans do not support.

They are dying anonymously and pointlessly, while the rest of us are free to buckle ourselves into the family vehicle and head off to the malls and shop.

I don’t think most of these people are “bad” people. They’re spoiled; they’re indifferent; they’re clueless. Many of them probably don’t think there’s anything they can do to stop the war (Democracy? What’s that?) so they tune it out.

But the provisions of The Civilian War Footing Act will see to it they can’t tune it out. And if a majority of Americans don’t want to be inconvenienced, they have to stop the war. And the politicians who started the bleeping war had better have a bleeping good excuse, or their careers are over.

I’d like to think that if the U.S. faced a genuine threat, Americans would respond and do whatever it took, as long as it took, to save our country. But starting a war is a serious matter that requires serious consideration. I would have thought that, after Vietnam, the nation would know better than to allow itself to be railroaded into another foreign quagmire, but here we are again.

Clearly, we need to learn to think twice about war. And if the alleged threat is more hypothetical than imminent, then let’s learn to just say no.

This rightie blogger thinks he already has a “personal” Social Security account. And even though he believes he already has a “personal account,” he agrees with President Bush that establishing “personal accounts” will fix the system.

Surber usually isn’t one of the dumbest wingnuts — just average, I’d say — but he dropped off the IQ scale entirely this time.

It’s possible that he does know how the system works and is just playing some kind of semantic game to snark at Atrios. But it ought to be obvious even to an idiot that Atrios is talking about the private investment accounts President Bush wants, so if Surber is just playing with semantics that would make him not only stupid, but a stupid asshole.

That said, Atrios’s post does beg some questions between “carve outs” and “add ons” and whether the Dems ought to make any moves whatsoever in the direction of personal Social Security accounts. The discussion started with a post on The Economist advocating a “grand bargain.” Brad DeLong explains:

Back in 1998, 1999, and 2000 there was a deal to be struck: bring the existing Social Security system back into balance with a combination of (small) tax increases and (moderate) future benefit cuts, and supercharge it with add-on private but regulated and insured personal accounts. But neither Gingrich, Hastert, Armey, Delay, or Lott were interested in such a deal–it would give another substantive public-policy victory to Bill Clinton, you see. After 2000 Bush was interested in–well, it was never clear what Bush was interested in, for different advisors said very different things, and Bush never proposed a plan.

But the deal that was there to be struck in 1998, 1999, and 2000 is still there to be struck, if program design and decision-making can be moved out of the White House to locations with credibility.

In this case, as I understand it, the add-on private accounts were not expected to solve the Social Security program’s anticipated shortfalls, but would just provide an additional source of income for seniors without changing the nature of the system itself. The system itself would still require some other kind of revenue increase to keep it going. Carve-out accounts would be something else. The idea behind carve-outs is that redirecting money coming into the system into private investment accounts would somehow magically solve the system’s solvency problem. But even if these private accounts did well, redirecting the money would require the government to borrow trillions of dollars from somewhere else to pay the Social Security benefits already committed to. Paul Krugman explains:

Advocates of privatization almost always pretend that all we have to do is borrow a bit of money up front, and then the system will become self-sustaining. The Wehner memo talks of borrowing $1 trillion to $2 trillion “to cover transition costs.” Similar numbers have been widely reported in the news media.

But that’s just the borrowing over the next decade. Privatization would cost an additional $3 trillion in its second decade, $5 trillion in the decade after that and another $5 trillion in the decade after that. By the time privatization started to save money, if it ever did, the federal government would have run up around $15 trillion in extra debt.

The add-on accounts advocated by The Economist are, I think, just supposed to be a good-will gesture in the spirit of bipartisanship. Matt Yglesias writes:

…there’s sort of no telling what sort of foolish things the Democrats will agree to, but I say no, no, no to this. For one thing, while stonewalling on administration priorities may work out okay if you’re in opposition, it actually works way better if you’re actually in charge on the Hill. In the minority, you don’t need to agree with administration proposals, but you do need to deal with them on some level. In opposition, administration proposals can simply be dismissed out of hand. And, indeed, any proposal that involves “carve out” private accounts should be rejected out of hand. Such accounts are poor public policy (increasing the riskiness of retirement at a time of generally growing riskiness, increasing inequality at a time of generally growing inequality) and the political proof is in the pudding — opposing them wins elections, proposing them loses elections.

The starting point for a responsible approach to the federal budget is, in the short term, bringing the ruinously costly Iraq War to as speedy a conclusion as possible. Next is rescinding the bulk of Bush’s tax cuts. Next would be looking toward some increase in taxes on gasoline or carbon emissions. Reform of the country’s wildly inadequate health care system (implicating, among other things, Medicare and Medicaid) should always be a priority. Minor adjustments to the Social Security tax and payout formula could prove necessary in the future depending on what happens to immigration and productivity, but needn’t be a high-level priority. Carving private accounts out of the system should remain off the table and certainly Democrats have no business collaborating in any such endeavor.

Atrios was talking about the carve-out program President Bush tried to sell. Brad DeLong responds here. As I see it, the question is whether there is any reason for Democrats to consider an add-on program, and DeLong thinks there might be.

However, I doubt an add-on program would appease the righties. Richard Stevenson wrote in the New York Times (March 7, 2005):

On the other side, supporters of Mr. Bush’s approach said there was no chance that add-on accounts could be the basis for a deal.

“There is no support whatsoever among conservatives in the House and the Senate for add-on accounts,” said Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian research group that has promoted private investment accounts for two decades. “The whole point is transforming the Social Security system from a system where people are dependent on the government to one where people can save for themselves and accumulate wealth on their own, and add-on accounts don’t do anything to transform Social Security.”

On top of that, many Democrats fear that add-on accounts would open a door over the long run to accounts drawn from payroll taxes.

“It’s a dangerous concept for those who say they support Social Security,” said Roger Hickey, co-director of Campaign for America’s Future, a liberal research and advocacy group that opposes Mr. Bush’s approach. “Private accounts, whether financed out of the Social Security system or financed out of general revenues, are still a bad substitute for guaranteed Social Security benefits. So anyone who thinks add-ons are a solution should think twice because they really are a Trojan horse.”

But it is exactly that possibility – that add-on accounts might pave the way for accounts carved out of Social Security – that might make the concept politically viable as a compromise, Professor Patashnik of the University of Virginia said.

“If you ideologically want to transform Social Security and thereby begin changing F.D.R.’s legacy and the welfare state, the question is whether add-on accounts will help you or hurt you,” he said. “Would it be a failure because the existing Social Security system remains in place and you haven’t carved anything out of it? Or will add-on accounts become popular and develop a constituency, so that young people who have less trust in the government than in the marketplace ultimately pressure Congress to increase the size of the accounts relative to Social Security?”

So I’m with Atrios — no private accounts attached to Social Security. If the government wants to initiate some kind of forced savings/investment accounts — and I’m not saying it should — these accounts should be in an entirely separate program.

For more than you ever wanted to know about Social Security, see eRipost. See also the Century Foundation and Paul Krugman.

Update: Sabastian Mallaby weighs in.

Judging from the hints flying around Washington, the administration sees how to bridge this divide. Democrats may be allergic to personal Social Security accounts, but they are enthusiastic about other ideas for personal retirement accounts that just don’t have “Social Security” in the title. …

… while Republicans have been pushing personal retirement accounts as part of an entitlement fix, Democrats have been pushing personal retirement accounts because they worry about worker insecurity. By enlarging the debate so that it’s about savings in the era of globalization rather than just Social Security, negotiators can conjure up the common ground that was missing during the 2005 train wreck. Personal accounts need not be merely the alternative to the traditional Social Security benefit. They can simultaneously be the alternative to the nation’s outrageously regressive system of tax breaks for saving and a way to help ordinary people build nest eggs. When personal accounts become both of these things, perhaps Republicans and Democrats alike will back them.

Mallaby ignores the fact that the wingnuts really, truly want to destroy Social Security. They’ve desired this since the FDR Administration. This has nothing to do with the flaws or merits of the program; they just want to get rid of it on principle. They’re not going to stop. The Dems could offer up a wonderful personal retirement account program separate from the Social Security System, and the wingnuts will still want to destroy Social Security.

An if the Democrats offer a progressive personal retirement account program that mostly benefits working and middle-class Americans, not the wealthy, the wingnuts will hate that, too.