Talk straight on entitlements

John McCain has been caught in a political bind for making two seemingly conflicting pledges. He has repeatedly vowed to fight tax increases, including Social Security payroll-tax increases, if elected president. Yet he also has said that "everything" — including tax hikes — "has to be on the table" for Social Security reform.

He can't have it both ways. And we can't avert the looming fiscal disaster facing Social Security without keeping a wide array of proposed solutions "on the table." The same principle applies to Medicare.

Sen. McCain has long been a champion of overdue entitlement reform — and "straight talk." He now should offer some of the latter by admitting that saving Social Security will require, among other difficult steps, generating more revenue for the system than the current format offers. Some form of a Social Security tax boost appears inevitable.

Another idea that should be "on the table" is raising the eligibility age, a move advocated by the American Academy of Actuaries in a report released Monday. Other ways to balance Social Security's books include reducing benefits and allowing younger workers to opt out of the system to a limited degree by diverting some of their income to personal retirement accounts.

Barack Obama, like Sen. McCain, has taken on this thorny topic. Earlier this year, Sen. Obama called for eliminating the income cap, now $102,000, on Social Security taxes. He since has revised that plan, and wants to scrap the cap at $250,000, leaving a "doughnut hole" from $102,000 to that higher level.

Critics, including Sen. McCain, fairly warn that such a sweeping tax boost could have severe consequences for not just the owners of small businesses, but their employees. Yet even that enormous tax hike wouldn't assure Social Security's future solvency.

If easy solutions were handy for the problems of the massive federal entitlement systems, politicians wouldn't have been dodging this issue for so long and exacerbating those problems in the procrastinating process.

At least our major parties' presidential candidates agree that the status quo is not a responsible option for those endangered programs.

Now it's up to the American public to demand that not just presidential but U.S. Senate and U.S. House candidates deliver more practical answers — "straight talk" — on Social Security and Medicare.