Finally, a liberal commentator capable of independent thought. Michael Kinsley admits that President Bush’s Social Security indexing proposal is “honest,” “courageous,” and “highly progressive”:

Above all, Bush was honest and even courageous about Social Security. Social Security is about writing checks: Money goes in, money goes out. As Bush has discovered in the last few months, there are no shadows to hide in while you fiddle with it. The problem is fewer and fewer workers supporting more and more retirees, and there are only two possible solutions: Someone has to pay more in, and/or someone has to take less out.

On Thursday, Bush didn’t exactly go from explicitly denying this to explicitly admitting it. But he went from implicitly suggesting that his privatization scheme is a pain-free solution to implicitly endorsing a plan for serious benefit cuts. For a politician, that’s an admirable difference.

Even more to Bush’s credit, the plan he’s backing is highly progressive. Benefits for low- income workers would keep rising with average wages, as now, but benefits for middle- and high-income people would be geared more toward merely keeping up with inflation. This allows Bush to say that no one’s benefits would be cut, although some people would be getting up to 40% less than they are currently promised. But in the swamp of Social Security politics, that is really minimal protection from the alligators.

So Democrats now face a choice: Are they going to be alligators on this one? Why Bush has taken this on remains a mystery. There is no short-term political advantage, and there are other real long-term problems that are more pressing. But he has done it, to his credit.

Obviously, I don’t agree with everything in Kinsley’s column. In particular, his assertion that Bush’s plan would “alienate people from the Republican Party for generations” is over the top. Nevertheless, it’s refreshing to read a liberal commentator who doesn’t base his arguments solely on DNC talking points.