Jonathan Chance:I gotta admit, taking on AARP as opposing a republican issue is pretty fucking bold. If AARP’s membership isn’t a significant contributor to the republican party I’ll eat my cat.
dropzone:That’s what’s been bothering me about this, too. Make whatever noises you want but you DON’T piss off your own power base.
Don’t think the AARP hasn’t noticed, either. A good part of their Social Security blog is currently devoted to coverage of the USANext ads, about which they have this to say:
Ironically, this conservative backstabbing of the AARP follows at least a decade of laborious and largely successful efforts on the part of Republicans to woo the AARP toward more conservative policy stances. As pointed out during the Medicare debates last year by the American Prospect,
All that effort in order to secure AARP as a Republican ally, and now USANext thinks it’s a good move to accuse AARP of being anti-soldier and pro-gay-marriage?
1.5. The administration is not officially linked to this and will repudiate it if pressed, but will not be inclined to quarrel with any advantage it happens to wind up giving them.
IIRC that was more or less how it went with the Swift Boat thing too.
I’m gonna go with #1, JC. This Administration doesn’t cut you a lot of slack for having been its ally in the past, if you’re not on its side where it counts right now.
Yes, damn their fruitcakes, but their waffles are excellent!
On a more serious note, I can’t see what the hell WeirdDave is getting at; I suppose that someone who thinks there are circumstances under which private SS accounts might be a good idea might want to see a specific bill before offering criticism, and that’s fine, for such a person. But folderol like this:
is far from the truth. Bush DOES have a proposal – maybe not quite detailed enough to vote on, but well-enough outlined for criticism by those who find the entire premise absolutely unacceptable, as well as those who find the president’s assumptions too optimistic.
It’s interesting, WeirdDave, that you bring up Clinton’s health plan, yet draw the wrong conclusions from it. The plan’s opponents attacked it from the beginning, and its defenders didn’t complain that it wasn’t ready yet – they defended the broad outline; both used details as they became available. If there hadn’t been that initial attack, if opponents had waited for a bill to appear in Congress, we probably WOULD have Universal Health Care – at least, it would have had a better chance. Similarly, if SS privatization opponents don’t attack NOW, the proposal may achieve too much momentum to be defeated in Congress.
I suspect that wouldn’t bother you a bit. I suspect, in fact, that you already like the idea, and as long as some unspecified odious terms or components are not added, you’re going to support it when it comes to a vote (not that you’ll get to vote on it, but here, if nowhere else, you’ll be arguing in favor). I further suspect that you’re going to relish the time SSP opponents will waste arguing with your partisan twittering instead of preaching to the unconverted.
I’ve pointed out that the clear outlines of Bush’s proposal are on the table. I’ve asked you what’s lacking as a basis for serious discussion. You haven’t answered. If you want a substantive discussion, that would be a good place to start, rather than avoiding one based on your moronic insistence that there isn’t anything out there worth discussing yet.
Damn skippy I’m in favor of the idea of privatization in general, however I realize there is a large chance of making things worse if it’s not done properly, which is why I refuse to commit one way or another until I see the details. Considering that a worker making 20K/yr, if he was able to invest his SS payroll taxes in an account with an average real return of 6%, would generate an account worth almost 400K after 40 years, and that such an account would support an annuity that paid him about $1,500/month verses the $800/month that SS promises and the idea begins to make sense. Add to that the fact that the money would be put back to work in the economy and not pissed away by the government and it looks damned attractive. Figure out how to do it without screwing current retirees or adding huge costs to the system (which I have NOT seen yet) and you’d have to be a blithering idiot NOT to support privatization. Then again, I’m already crazy, not only do I believe that my money is mine and not the governments, but I’ve been a huge proponent of means testing for SS benefits for years (that’s right, I have no problems with…wait for it…CUTTING BENEFITS. Heh. that probably made more than a few democrats flinch), in spite of the fact that (assuming everything continues to go as it currently is and as I have planned ) doing so will take me right out of the SS program. I say that even considering that I am self employed and FICA gets me for twice as much as the average Joe, so I stand to be doubly screwed.
Finally Since I am a registered democrat who is an ideological moderate and voted for Kerry, I have to wonder exactly what partisan axe I am supposed to be grinding. Care to enlighten me?
Isn’t this proposal by the same people that are screaming bloody murder that 10 judges didn’t get approved? Bush has put over 200 people on the federal bench and the fact that 10 of his nominations were stopped by the Dems has them crying that the Dems cheated and that we have to change the rules so that ANY judge that he nominates gets appointed.
This administration does not comprimise. They go after what they want and anybody who disagrees with them is an enemy and must be destroyed.
But George just stays above the fray and acts all nice while his goon squad does the dirty work.
Just to lend some support Nametag’s claims about the history of the debate over Clinton’s health care plan, I highly recommend this PBS timeline. Click through all three pages to get the whole thing.
And thanks to 2004 Koufax Award winner Digby, for posting this timeline in his blog a few months back.
Weirddave:Considering that a worker making 20K/yr, if he was able to invest his SS payroll taxes in an account with an average real return of 6%, would generate an account worth almost 400K after 40 years, and that such an account would support an annuity that paid him about $1,500/month verses the $800/month that SS promises and the idea begins to make sense. Add to that the fact that the money would be put back to work in the economy and not pissed away by the government and it looks damned attractive.
Where do you get the idea that SS contributions paid as benefits to retirees aren’t “put back to work in the economy”? Most SS benefit recipients spend their benefits, putting them back into the economy very effectively. (And the SS bureaucratic overhead is quite low, much lower than the typical overhead for individually managed investments or insurance plans.)
Your hypothetical worker’s investment performance doesn’t take into account the survivor and disability benefits that SS also provides. Under the current system, if a worker is disabled before retirement, they can get lifetime disability benefits even if they are never able to contribute to SS again. Surviving spouses and minor children of workers who die before retirement are also eligible for benefits. Under your proposed “private account” alternative, workers who are disabled or die before accumulating large amounts of savings are pretty much screwed (or their survivors are).
Not really. As part of any reform, provisions would have to be made to spin off the D part of OASDI. No big deal, but it’s things like this that must be addressed before I would get behind a plan.
Weirddave:As part of any reform, provisions would have to be made to spin off the D part of OASDI.
Don’t forget the S (survivors) part too, then. However, if the disability and survivor support functions of SS are “spun off” into some other kind of program, the money will have to come from somewhere. If it’s all supposed to come out of the current SS payroll taxes, as all the present functions of OASDI currently do, then your hypothetical worker is not going to have as much money to invest in his own retirement account. No fair just hand-waving away that part of the problem without accounting for the expense.
Oh, and I would like to get the details on the annuity your hypothetical worker buys with his retirement savings. Is this a lifetime guaranteed-income-stream annuity? How were the figures you quote arrived at?
Weirddave: *Figure out how to do it without screwing current retirees or adding huge costs to the system *
The latter, I’m afraid, is impossible. No matter how you slice it, no matter what you do, switching over from the current “pay-for-your-parents” system to a “pay-for-yourself” or private accounts system is going to generate massive transition costs. During the transition, at least two generations will have to be paid for simultaneously: benefits for the current retirees on the one hand, and the contributions to the private accounts of future retirees on the other. There is no way to make the transition without huge transition costs.
Which would imply what assumptions about the economy? In the long run, the growth in a country’s stock values, and its economic growth, are pretty much the same thing.
This is a question that’s been kicking around the discussion for months: how do you get those sorts of returns out of stocks, if the economy’s only growing at a 1.6% rate over that time.
This is one of the Trustees’ assumptions on which their ‘intermediate’ projections, the ones that everyone quotes, are based. In their ‘low-cost’ projection, which assumes 1.9% growth, the Trust Fund is never exhausted. So the question is, how do you get an economy that’s growing fast enough to provide such great returns on stock investments, yet poorly enough so that the Trust Fund runs out of money sometime around mid-century?
Where do you get the $800? I just went to SocSec calculators from two very different sources - The Cato Institute’s and Sen. Schumer’s; since retirement age for people in their 20s now is 67, I assumed a 27 year old man making $20K annually. Cato says SocSec will pay $13,685 annually; Schumer’s said $14,282. You say $9,600.
Got a cite that the Dems are opposed to that? Most Dems I know think the system’s progressivity (lower-income people do better in the benefits-to-payments ratio than higher-income people) is a GOOD thing. And IIRC, taxing Social Security benefits of upper-income retirees (a modest form of means-testing) was a Clinton-era innovation.
Good catch, RTF. Weirddave, those numerical discrepancies do suggest that you’ve been hearing some pro-privatization propaganda that’s pretty heavy on the bullshit.
I’d still like to get the details about the hypothetical annuity paying $1500 a month, though. Can you really buy an annuity paying as much as $18,000 annually with all the advantages SS provides—lifetime guaranteed benefits and survivor benefits, as well as built-in cost of living adjustments—for the sum you mention? (And again, that’s not even taking into account the fact that all disability and survivor benefits for pre-retirement workers also come out of SS funds.)
Well of course he’s gonna catch any math mistakes, that’s what he does.
[Chevy Chase as President Ford]
I was told that there would be no math.
[/CCAPF]
Seriously though, it’s funny that you bring up the Cato institute, because that figure ($800) came from one of their papers, IIRC, however, it’s the other end of things. (What a worker who retires now would get, not what a worker retiring in 40 years would get) Sorry for the confusion. Since we’re on the subject, the Cato Institute’s 6.2 percent solution is exactly the kind of plan that I would support. From the summary:
