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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (232228)	3/2/2002 10:36:55 AM
From: E. T.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

United States supported Afghan rebels during its war with the Soviets. U.S. gave lots of aid in terms of military training and weapons. But when the job was done aid came to nothing. There was no aid. Not like the aid that is proposed today. Just as Powell says to Afghans today, we won't let you down this time.

To: Neocon who wrote (232228)	3/2/2002 10:37:21 AM
From: E. T.	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769670

Bush Uses Own Brand of Math on Social Security nytimes.com By EDWARD WYATT n promoting the benefits of his proposal to overhaul Social Security, President Bush adopted an example this week that few financial planners would be likely to embrace, and one that more than doubles the potential of the recommendations of his own commission on Social Security. In an address on Thursday to the National Summit on Retirement Savings, Mr. Bush maintained that a person who directed the investment of his Social Security taxes into the stock market would have three times the monthly retirement income of someone who had depended on Social Security. "Someone retiring today after 45 years of work would be entitled to a monthly benefit of $1,128 a month from Social Security," Mr. Bush said. "If that same retiree, if those Social Security taxes had been invested in the stock market over the last 45 years, during the same period of time, that person would now have a nest egg of $590,000, or income of more than $3,700 a month." But to get that $3,700 a month, a person would have to invest every penny of his retirement savings or Social Security payroll taxes in the stock market his entire work life. "That is ill-advised at best and unconscionable at worst," said Harold Evensky, a principal at Evensky, Brown & Katz, a financial planning firm in Coral Gables, Fla., that is part of the Alpha Group, an influential caucus of financial planners. Not only does the example require the investments to have been made in the best period of stock market investment returns in history, Mr. Evensky said, but it also does not account for how an investor would probably have reacted in periods of stock market losses. "You might ask why fiduciaries of pension plans don't keep 100 percent of their portfolios in equities," Mr. Evensky said. Rather, those professional portfolio managers keep 40 percent to 60 percent of their assets in stocks, with the remainder in bonds, to balance the volatility and potentially higher returns of the stock market with the need to protect principal. That more conservative posture of professional money managers mirrors the assumptions used by the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security. In December, the commission released its report laying out three models for an overhaul of Social Security. The proposals would allow a worker to redirect up to two-thirds of his payroll taxes, or up to $1,000 annually, into a personal retirement account, in exchange for giving up the right to an offsetting amount of traditional Social Security benefits. But the commission assumed that workers would rarely have more than 50 percent of a portfolio in stocks at any time, and noted that only the youngest workers typically have 80 percent or more of retirement assets in equities. Under the commission's assumptions, that would produce retirement benefits in 50 years measuring, at best, $1,983 a month — 88 percent better than the worker could assume under the current Social Security system, but barely half the $3,700 a month in the Bush example. Claire Buchan, a White House deputy press secretary, said Mr. Bush's illustration was not intended to portray an actual experience that could result from one of the president's proposals or even the portfolio that an actual investor would probably choose. "It was for the purpose of example," Ms. Buchan said. "It was very clear what he was saying."