>>I keep re-thinking this 2% proposal
LOL. There is no evidence that you ever "thought" about it.
Gore the Hysteric
By George F. Will
Sunday, May 21, 2000; Page B07
Al Gore thinks it is risky. The antecedent of the pronoun "it" could be anything (school choice, tax cuts, entitlement reforms, the internal combustion engine, repeal of the designated hitter rule) that George W. Bush favors. But the risky thing currently alarming Gore, a professional hysteric, is Bush's proposal to allow Americans to invest a small portion of their payroll taxes in personal retirement accounts.
The biggest risk is in doing nothing--neither raising Social Security taxes nor cutting benefits nor causing, as Bush proposes, retirement funds to grow faster. The Social Security Administration says doing nothing will force a 25 percent to 33 percent reduction of benefits for 150 million people currently under 40.
Some critics of Bush's plan worry that individuals might invest retirement funds recklessly, assuming that government would be the insurer of last resort--that if there were a long cycle of declining share prices, government would at least cover their losses. But under Bush's plan, investors would choose not individual stocks but a few "steady, reliable funds."
The most risk-free way (free of economic risk; political risk is another matter) to start fixing Social Security would be to raise the retirement age. If in 1935, when Social Security was enacted, the retirement age had been indexed to life expectancy, the retirement age today would be about 73.
Bush's basic approach is supported by many Democrats, including Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, who says, "It turns capitalism in a direction that is very defensible." He notes that liberals should know by now that inheritance taxes are ineffective at doing what something like the Bush approach to retirement security would do--help narrow the gap between rich and poor.
Allowing people with modest resources to attempt to multiply those resources in the stock market is the best way to open broader access to affluence. But although about half of American households now own stock, Gore portrays the stock market as irrational, like gambling (last week he referred to "stock market roulette" and "rolling the dice"), and riddled with fraud. Pandering to students at the Fordham Business School in Manhattan, he said:...
Gore warns that Bush's proposed personal retirement accounts would divide Americans into winners and losers. Actually, the basic division would be between winners and even bigger winners. Mitchell says that looking at the best and worst 46-year periods (the span of an average person's working life) in market history, workers' personal retirement accounts in the best period would have done almost twice as well as those in the worst, but those in the worst would have done much better than by relying on Social Security alone.
Congress does not rely on it. Under the Thrift Savings Plan, members of Congress, and other federal workers, can invest up to 10 percent of their salary annually in one of three retirement funds--one stock-based, one based on corporate bonds, one based on government bonds. Over the past 10 years the average return from the stock-based fund has been 18 percent. Last year's return was 20.95 percent.
The 1988 legislation creating this plan was co-sponsored by Gore.
Today, in his infinite condescension toward the American public, he thinks that plans of the sort Congress created for itself and other federal workers, and that Bush proposes for all Americans, are just too complex ("risky") for "tens of millions" of Americans.
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