US: US President George Bush has acknowledged for the first time that his plan to restructure social security (the US pension system), once his second-term domestic priority, is moribund because he has been unable to build public support for it.
Citing the expensive and more urgent task of rebuilding New Orleans and other hurricane-damaged regions of the Gulf states, Mr Bush asserted on Tuesday that he retained "plenty, plenty" of political capital to push his agenda through Congress.
But in enumerating his short-term priorities at a nearly hour-long news conference in the White House Rose Garden, the president mentioned only the war on terror and the hurricane reconstruction.
"There seems to be a diminished appetite in the short term" for dealing with social security, Bush said with a dash of resignation.
Earlier this year, in the face of united Democratic opposition to his social security agenda, Mr Bush campaigned tirelessly throughout the United States, trying to build support for his proposal to allow younger workers to create personal retirement accounts with a portion of their social security payroll deductions. But the effort never took off.
Whether Congress would act on social security next year remains an open question. Some lawmakers, such as Senator Chuck Hagel (Republican, Nebraska), have expressed doubt that Congress in an election year would be able to summon the political wherewithal to take on such a hot-button issue. Mr Bush said as much on Tuesday, noting that such action called for "political courage".
The president told reporters that he would continue to "remind" the public and lawmakers that social security's viability was "a long-term issue that we must solve" because the problem was "not going to go away". - (LA Times-Washington Post Service)