No sooner had President Bush offered his tentative remarks in favor of a Social Security system in which benefits grow faster for the poor than for the rich than the Democrats and their allies set out to scare the public about it. “The president’s offer of ‘sliding scale’ benefit cuts would result in the biggest benefit cut in the history of Social Security,” said Rep. Sander Levin of Michigan, who is the top Democrat on the Social Security subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee. “Social Security is not a poverty program, it is a retirement system people have worked hard for, paid into, and have earned. The president and congressional Republicans are determined to replace the guarantee of Social Security with risky private accounts and massive benefit cuts.”

Senator Schumer, who seems to have rediscovered the evils of investing in the stock market now that he’s been safely reelected for another six years with lots of Wall Street money, said, “Privatization plus deep benefit cuts to middle-class citizens is even worse than privatization alone.”

A Chicago Tribune story quoted the AARP’s policy director, John Rother, as calling Mr. Bush’s idea “Draconian” and saying that tax increases would be better than benefit cuts. The Tribune quoted Senator Durbin, a Democrat of Illinois, calling the president’s position “indefensible.”

Well, Draco, call your office. While the Athenian lawgiver was known for punishing even minor crimes by death, all President Bush is talking about doing for wealthy Americans is indexing the increases in their Social Security benefits to price increases, that is, to inflation, rather than to wage increases. Here’s what Mr. Bush said Thursday night: “The lower-income people’s benefits would rise faster. And the whole goal would be to see to it that nobody retired in poverty. Somebody who has worked all their life and paid in the Social Security system would not retire into poverty.”

This is the kind of federal safety net that in the days of Ronald Reagan and House Speaker O’Neill would have attracted a broad political consensus. All of a sudden, though, the Democrats have become the party that wants to lavish government benefits on the rich and President Bush has become the defender of more generous benefits to the poor.

There are really only four ways out of the current program’s fiscal problems – private accounts and the increased returns and economic growth they would unleash; population growth; benefit cuts, and tax increases. Our view all along has been that large private accounts along the lines of the plan put forth by Rep. Paul Ryan and Senator Sununu would solve Social Security’s fiscal problems without either raising taxes or cutting benefits. These accounts would start to end the Social Security pyramid scheme in which current workers pay for the previous generation’s retirement.

But we also think that population growth is a possible solution to the Social Security problem, and one that Mr. Bush hasn’t talked about enough. Since the problem, in essence, is that there aren’t enough American workers to support the baby boom generation when it retires, one way to solve the problem would be with substantial increases in legal immigration to America of younger taxpayers. Another would be taking steps to encourage a culture of life. This could include steps such as promoting adoption as an option and making sure that government isn’t subsidizing the destruction of embryos. It is also linked to education reforms, such as school vouchers or tuition tax credits, that are friendly to those with large families. Mr. Bush has instituted school vouchers in Washington, D.C., signed legislation banning partial birth abortion, and called for changes to allow more legal immigration, but he hasn’t linked those initiatives to Social Security. These are all sensitive political issues on their own, and one has to be careful not to instrumentalize them, but if the connection is drawn the right way we’d wager the American people would grasp it.

The remaining two options – benefit cuts and tax increases – are less preferable. Mr. Bush is correct to suggest that benefit cuts would be better than the tax increases that the Democrats would resort to. Reducing the rate of growth in benefits while keeping tax rates level at least has the virtue of restraining the growth of government. Raising taxes the way the AARP and the Democrats want would increase the share of government.

Congress would have to design any benefit cuts carefully, though, to try to prevent the system from being gamed. One of the lessons of the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program is that benefits affect behavior. More generous Social Security benefits for lower-income people will doubtless spawn plenty of shenanigans in which income is converted into assets or realized at a time most advantageous to the taxpayer seeking more generous Social Security benefits.

The most constructive effect of the Democratic scare rhetoric on the benefits “cuts” would be for it to lead in the end not to tax increases but rather to a renewed resolve on the part of Republicans to insist on dealing with Social Security through large private accounts or population growth. These are the approaches on which Mr. Bush campaigned in 2004 and on which he won significant support on Wall Street, among Hispanics, and among Orthodox Jews, traditional Catholics, and evangelical Christian Americans. He didn’t campaign on a platform of reducing Social Security benefits for the rich or turning the program into a safety net that primarily serves the poor. He campaigned for private accounts, for increased legal immigration, and for family values.

If Mr. Bush and his allies can’t get that pro-growth agenda through Congress, it’s fertile ground for a 2006 campaign against those anti-family, anti-immigrant, anti-Wall Street Democrats who want to raise your taxes. In other words, there is more than one direction in which the Social Security issue can be turned into political scare rhetoric, a point the Democrats and their allies may want to keep in mind the next time they feel the urge to compare the president to Draco.