"Knowledge is power. Most of us agree that something has to be done to strengthen Social Security, and I believe it's irresponsible to arbitrarily dismiss any idea, Republican nor Democrat, without giving it a hard look"

Knowledge is power because it equips citizens and lawmakers to choose wisely among complex, high-stakes options. The opening assertion sets a standard for public deliberation: decisions should flow from facts, analysis, and transparent reasoning rather than slogans or tribal loyalty. Applied to Social Security, that ethic rejects reflexive partisanship and insists on a fuller accounting of trade-offs, costs, and long-term consequences.

Social Security’s challenge is structural and demographic: longer life expectancies, shifting worker-to-beneficiary ratios, and economic volatility place pressure on a system designed in another era. Acknowledging that “something has to be done” is not a capitulation to any ideology; it is a recognition that promises must be aligned with resources so that commitments to retirees, disabled workers, and survivors endure. The call is for intellectual humility, an openness to proposals from across the political spectrum, not because all ideas are equal, but because none should be rejected before evidence is weighed.

Such openness means testing proposals against shared criteria: actuarial solvency over multiple decades, protection for the most vulnerable, fairness across generations, administrative simplicity, and economic impact on workers and employers. It means inviting competing analyses, listening to program trustees and independent experts, modeling outcomes under varied assumptions, and surfacing unintended consequences. It also means resisting purity tests that make compromise a moral failing rather than a civic virtue.

There is a civic message tucked within the policy message. Democratic self-government depends on a culture that rewards good-faith inquiry and penalizes willful ignorance. If knowledge is power, then power exercised without knowledge is a threat to the very people Social Security is meant to protect. The path forward is not to sanitize debate of contention, but to elevate contention with substance, rigorous scrutiny, clear metrics, and a shared commitment to preserve both the program’s solvency and its social promise.