Editorial covers pros and cons of latest move in Social Security reform

• The president has anointed Bob Bennett the Republicans' point man for Social Security reform in the U.S. Senate.
• We don't know whether to congratulate Bob or offer our condolences.
• We like several things about his plan.
• Foremost, it faces the solvency problem head on.
• By one respected estimate, Social Security is projected to start paying out more than it collects in 2018, and exhaust its trust fund in 2042.
• Bennett would ease that problem using different indexes to compute the increases in benefits that compensate for inflation.
• He would do that in a way that would be progressive, meaning that his plan would be more generous in protecting the benefits of people at the bottom of the income scale than those at the top.
• His original plan also would have included a form of private accounts.
• Since President Bush's barnstorming for that idea has crash-landed - for good reason - the White House has given the OK for Bennett to offer two separate bills.
• One would change the benefits indexes, the other would introduce private accounts.
• We always have been leery of the president's push to divert a portion of payroll taxes into private accounts.
• For one thing, that would make the solvency problem much worse, not better, at least in the short term.
• For another, it would change the entire nature of Social Security, which has never been an investment scheme.
• The Democrats are resisting, because they sense a bait-and-switch in which the Senate would not pass private accounts, the House would, and a conference committee would put them into the final bill, where the Democrats would have less power to stop them.