During last week's Republican debate in Mesa, Arizona, GOP co-frontrunners Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney claimed "courage" and "resolute" as the single words which respectively best described them. If so, the two rivals might want to take a look back at their records on Social Security. After all, in 2005 Santorum was the GOP point man in the Senate for President Bush's wildly unpopular Social Security privatization scheme. And for his part, Romney backed the diversion of Social Security funding into private accounts during his first run for the White House. But now, these two resolutely courageous men are just running away.
To be sure, the Social Security system that provides income for millions of elderly Americans has always posed a problem for Rick Santorum. In 1994, Santorum was strong advocate for raising the retirement age, only to reverse course during his losing reelection bid in 2006. Now the former Pennsylvania Senator has come full circle.
But Senator Santorum's passion for privatizing the Social Security system is a thing of the past. Make that the recent past.

In January 2005, then Senate Republican Conference Chairman Rick Santorum led the drive to make President Bush's privatization scheme a reality in Congress. To close the sale with skeptical colleagues (and an even more skeptical public), Santorum developed a presentation with the GOP's official talking points. "Talk about how much more money they'd have for retirement if they themselves had been investing in a personal account all these years," the GOP privatization sales kit counseled Republican officeholders, remembering all the while that:

"Your audience doesn't know how trillions and billions differ. They know these numbers are large, but not how large nor how many billions make a trillion. Boil numbers down to 'your family's share.' Also avoid percentages; your audience will try to calculate them in their head--no easy task while listening to a speech--and many will do it incorrectly."

But that was then and this is now. And in the interim, George W. Bush and his Republican allies learned draining the Social Security trust fund was slightly more popular than the Ebola virus. Worse still, as the Center for American Progress noted, the 2008 implosion on Wall Street which emptied millions of 401k's would have similarly gutted the private accounts the GOP so badly wanted to create. And, as Matthew Yglesias helpfully explained, there's always been the problem of adding trillions of dollars to the U.S. national debt:

"What privatizers want to say is that current retirees will keep getting benefits and future retirees will be okay despite our lack of benefits because we'll have private accounts. But current retirees can't get benefits if my money is in a private account. And my account can't be funded if I'm paying benefits for current retirees."

All of which explains why Mr. Courage decided discretion was the better part of valor in 2012. This time around, Santorum wants to cut Social Security spending by raising the retirement age, means testing benefits and using the consumer price index (CPI) instead of wage growth to determine annual cost of living adjustments. Privatization, not so much:

"There's nobody for the last 15 years that's been more in favor of personal savings accounts than I have for Social Security. But we were doing that when we had a surplus in Social Security. We are now running a deficit in Social Security. We are now running a huge deficit in this country...There will be hundreds of billions of dollars in increased debt, hundreds of billions of more debt being put on the books, which we can't simply -- we're going to be borrowing money from China to fund these accounts, which is wrong. I'm for those accounts, but first we have to get our fiscal house in order, balance this budget and then create the opportunity that Newt wants. But the idea of doing that now, is fiscal insanity."

In his defense, Rick Santorum was honest enough to admit his change of position. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is another matter altogether.
Speaking to an empty house at Ford Field in Detroit on Friday, Romney repeated his now comparatively mild prescription for Social Security:

"When it comes to Social Security, we will slowly raise the retirement age. We will slow the growth in benefits for higher-income retirees."

But "we" won't, Romney now insists, privatize the Social Security system. Obviously touchy on the subject, Mitt told a New Hampshire town hall audience last year that he supported no such thing:

Q: I have a question on Social Security...one way of doing it is privatizing, that people can invest their money, is that correct?
ROMNEY: I didn't say that here.
Q: Well, I saw it online, so maybe it's -
ROMNEY: I didn't mention that - there are - I didn't mention that. I described the three major one. There have been other ideas about people investing. You know, the disadvantage, I mean, the privatization of Social Security that doesn't make sense, the so-called privatizing of Social Security. There have been some who have said, "Let people save some of their money and invest it." The market goes up and down. I kind of like the system that we have in that regard.

It's no wonder Romney emphasized, "I didn't say that here." Because as his questioner rightly pointed out and as ThinkProgress has documented at length, for years Mitt Romney supported the very private accounts he now claims to oppose.
In his 2010 book, No Apology, Governor Romney proclaimed, "I also like the fact the individual retirement accounts would encourage more Americans to invest in the private sector that powers our economy." During a 2008 GOP presidential debate, Romney explained that "the president said let's have private accounts and take that surplus money that's being gathered now in Social Security and put that into private accounts. That works." The year before, Mitt frequently repeated his preference for private accounts:

June 2007: When a college student asked Romney how he, as president, planned to solidify Social Security's future, he endorsed private accounts: "One thing that the president proposed [on Social Security] that is a good idea is to take some of that money, or all of that surplus money and allow people to have a personal account. So they can invest in things that have a higher rate of return than just government debt. They can invest in things like our stock market or the world's stock market...so that they can get a better return, and maybe that would make up for some of the shortfall. That's a good idea."
October 2007: At a town hall, Romney said there were "two major paths" lawmakers could take to shore up Social Security. The first, he said, was "to raise taxes on people, which I don't want to do. And the other is to allow some portion of people's money that they're now having taken out of their salaries to be invested in Social Security." When an attendee told him his plan was "privatization," Romney replied, "You call it privatization. I call it a private account."

Back in 2000, Vice President Al Gore called it a "risky scheme." And with good reason. As Gore explained, "Because the trillion dollars that has been promised to young people has also been promised to older people," Gore explained, adding, "And you cannot keep both promises."
As the numbers show, the promise to America's seniors present and future can be kept with only minor tweaks. Despite the revenue lost to the recession and the recent temporary payroll tax cuts, Social Security can pay all of its benefits through 2036. Just by raising the cap on taxed income from its current $106,800, Social Security can be put on solid fiscal footing for decades to come. As the New York Times noted, "When the payroll tax - which finances Social Security and Medicare - was created, it covered 90 percent of all income. Today, with a ceiling at $106,800, it covers closer to 80 percent." Last year, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders proposed imposing the payroll tax on incomes above $250.000 a year, a move guaranteeing the program's future for 75 years.
Nevertheless, Social Security remains in the crosshairs of Republicans suddenly concerned about the national debt. But the conservative dream of privatizing the nation's retirement security system remains bad policy and even worse politics. Which is why man of "courage" Rick Santorum no longer supports it, and why the "resolute" Mitt Romney pretends he never did.