OUR THIRD WAY PRESIDENTS:

By legitimating changes that could lead over time to the conversion of Social Security into a means-tested program for the elderly poor only, Barack Obama has proven himself to be a true and worthy successor of his predecessor, George W. Bush.

This is not intended as hyperbole.  In any given era, presidents and Congresses of both parties tend to share a consensus. Eisenhower and Nixon, for example, shared much of the New Deal consensus with Roosevelt and Johnson.

So it is in our time. Future historians will note that Bush and Obama alike both successfully expanded access to healthcare goods and services for Americans -- but at the price of massive government subsidies to for-profit corporations as an alternative to the cheaper and more efficient expansion of public, nonprofit, low-cost social insurance. And the historians of the future will note that both the Republican president and his Democratic successor directly attacked the structure of Social Security as a universal program that pays promised benefits.

The two greatest expansions of the welfare state since Medicare's enactment in 1965 -- Medicare Part D under Bush in 2003 and the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") under Obama in 2010 -- both repudiated the logic of New Deal/Great Society insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare in favor of a radically different and far less efficient strategy of using tax credits for individuals to indirectly subsidize private provider monopolies and oligopolies.

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