from The Atlantic's Reihan Salam:
While O’Rourke’s exploits as a
teenage hacker could be dismissed as youthful mischief-making,
The Wall Street Journal reports that he called for
raising the Social Security eligibility age and means-testing federal entitlements as recently as 2012, when he was in his late 30s, old enough and wise enough, presumably, to have reached a considered judgment on such important questions of public policy.
Recall that O’Rourke was hardly alone among Democrats in championing entitlement reform during the Obama years. President Barack Obama, for one, had on several occasions called for restraining the growth of Social Security benefits, and the Affordable Care Act, his signature legislative achievement, introduced a series of new cost-control mechanisms designed to keep Medicare spending under control.
By 2018, O’Rourke had joined 150 of his Democratic colleagues in the Expand Social Security Caucus.
But the truth is that O’Rourke’s younger self was right on the merits. There really is a rock-solid egalitarian case for preventing old-age entitlements from gobbling up an ever-larger share of federal spending, and if O’Rourke hopes to build his presidential candidacy on something more than his supposed Gen X magnetism, he ought to consider making it while his many rivals race leftward.