A Popular Pledge

Enrique Peña Nieto has proposed social security for everyone in Mexico (today it is limited to people who work in the formal sector). That's bound to be a popular idea, and in the long term, it is a good one, too; it's hard for Mexico to consider itself part of the developed world when the barest of social safety nets are denied to most of the nation. However, the timing of the proposal is interesting, in that we learned last week that IMSS is on the brink of bankruptcy. I guess this could be a policy ju jitsu move, in which the reforms needed to insure the solvency of the institution are also used to radically expand its breadth, but I didn't read anything in the article suggesting that such was his argument.