Treasury's Paulson frets about protectionism

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Paulson was selected by Bush earlier this year to succeed Snow in a shake-up aimed at finding a more effective spokesman for the administration’s stalled second-term economic agenda.

The White House hope is that Paulson, the former head of Goldman Sachs, a premier Wall Street investment firm, will bring the same star power to this administration that Rubin, another former Goldman Sachs chief executive, brought to the Clinton administration.

Paulson said his top priorities would be achieving reform of Social Security and the other benefit programs, advancing the nation’s energy security, bolstering global trade and addressing the problems of income inequality between the wealthy and lower-income Americas.

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Bush suffered a major defeat last year when his plan to overhaul Social Security by introducing private investment accounts for younger workers stalled in Congress.

Paulson said he would work to achieve a bipartisan agreement on this issue. He offered no new ideas on how Social Security could be reformed to meet the financing needs of 78 million baby boomers, but he said a solution must be found soon.

“The longer we wait to fix this problem, the more limited will be the options available to us, the greater the cost and the more severe the economic impact on our nation,” he said.

He discounted warnings about the political problems in dealing with the nation’s big benefit programs.

“I have always tried to live by the philosophy that when there is a big problem that needs fixing, you should run toward it, rather than away from it,” he said.

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