I asked this on Twitter yesterday, but I think it’s an important issue. At lunch with a coworker last week talking over the “pay freeze” nonsense and the bargaining over the Bush tax cuts, I was a bit ready to throw the towel in over Barack Obama. And I retract none of my psychic derision of these latest moves. I’ll just quote my colleague Adam Hersh, “No Time to Dawdle: Latest Jobs Numbers Confirm Immediate Priority for Job Creation, Not Deficit Reduction”. Disaster. Oy.

That said, in analytic terms it’s worth trying to say what your discontent baseline is. Barack Obama has assembled an insufficient track record of progressive achievements compared to Bill Clinton? Doubtful. To Jimmy Carter? No. To John F Kennedy? Also to. To Lyndon Johnson, clearly yes, but the record on wars and civil liberties here is much worse. So is Barack Obama, for all his failings, the greatest progressive president in 70 years? That sounds like very high praise to me.

Now in political advocacy terms it doesn’t make sense to say “well, I’ll forgive a misguided pivot to austerity because the Vietnam War was a bigger mistake.” Nor does it make sense to say “I don’t care about claimed assassination powers because the internment of the Japanese was a bigger curtailment of civil liberties.” Nor does it make sense to say, “I won’t complain about cutting a deal with Pharma to get a major expansion of the welfare state because FDR cut a deal with white supremacists to get his.” You need to stand up for what you believe in in politics and complain when elected officials don’t do the right thing.

But as an analyst you do need to obtain some kind of perspective.

Paul Krugman comments on DC’s endless fascination with Social Security cuts:

When medical expenses are big, they’re big; even the very affluent are grateful when Medicare pays the bills for their mother-in-laws bypass or dialysis. The importance of Medicare, in short, is obvious to all but the very rich.

Social Security, by contrast, is something that matters enormously to the bottom half of the income distribution, but no so much to people in the 250K-plus club. A 30 percent cut in benefits would represent disaster for tens of millions of Americans, but a barely noticeable inconvenience for VSPs and everyone they know. A rise in the retirement age would be a vast hardship for people who do manual labor, but if anything a gift to VSPs, who don’t want to step aside in any case. And so on down the line.

So going after Social Security is a way to seem tough and serious — but entirely at the expense of people you don’t know.

Here’s a chart from the Our Fiscal Future report that makes the point:

Even though Social Security is only a very mildly redistributive program, inequality of wealth is such that it’s a vital element of the bottom 60 percent’s living standards but kind of small beer to the top twenty percent. But I would say the other thing here on the Medicare / Social Security contrast is that Medicare isn’t just a subsidy program for old people. It’s also a subsidy program for doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, pharmaceutical executives, etc. Those people have lobbyists, many of their professions are well-respected, and many members of the political/media elite have siblings, cousins, college buddies, and even spouses who work in those fields.

The tragedy is that this very same factor that makes it harder to cut Medicare is also why cutting Social Security is a much worse idea. Our health care sector is low productivity mess and there are a lot of health-improving things a low-income senior can buy with Social Security money but can’t buy with Medicare. Healthy food, a gym membership, home-repair, etc.

But there is a flipside to Krugman’s point here, namely that you could in fact trim Social Security benefits for wealthier Americans without causing them much harm. Conversely, if it were possible to address Social Security’s adequacy problem by boosting benefits at the bottom end you’d do an enormous amount to improve living standards. It’s kind of absurd that such a large share of federal spending goes to income support for the elderly and yet 10 percent of our seniors live below the poverty line.