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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DMaA who wrote (98456)	2/3/2005 1:52:02 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 793958

Thinking about this driving in, what bothers me about this comment is that it doesn't carry the debate forward, it poisons it. I agree that "I think they're trying to confuse people" is not constructive. With all the quack, quacking about SS, though, it's hard to single that out among the rest of the poisonous statements. If they were engaging in debate.. The poisonous climate was almost inevitable, I think, given how close to the poisonous campaign we still are and because the idea was advanced with great fanfare but no substance. We've seen very little of what this proposal will actually look like. All the politicos and all the pundits feel like they have to debate it but they have no substance to argue so they argue in the gutter. You can't debate a proposal if you don't have one on the table so you debate motives. Sad thing for such a serious subject. I have a couple of liberal friends who instinctively reacted against SS change and who have each argued with me that its intent is to make big bucks for the administration's WS backers, typical lefty meme, and that they'll make profits of thirty percent or more. They assume that these accounts will be held by brokerages, and nothing from the WH has disabused them of that. The thirty percent comes from the privatization efforts in Chile. They're making assumptions from limited information and unlimited suspicion. I've been telling them that the accounts will likely look more like the feds' TSP, which has negligible overhead, limited risk, and a track record. The WH has said little to clarify that, either. So people applaud or condemn the plan and its proponents from their partisan guts and the result ain't pretty. As for the described proposal, that business of owning only the earnings over three percent is certainly, er, interesting... ...said Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research. An aside for all the MSM bashers hereabouts: did anyone notice that the reporter identified the speaker's organization as "liberal"? He should get a point for that.