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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Les H who wrote (29474)	1/24/1999 11:19:00 AM
From: John Lacelle	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Les, That was Alan Greenspan's point exactly. He pointed out that historically, the returns of stock market investments by government agencies such as state and federal retirement plans underperform private investors like mutual funds by a rather substantial margin ie 9% for private, only 6% for the government. My own retirement plan is managed by a bunch of academics working for the State of California, a worst-cast scenario if there ever was one. Naturally, they underperform the S and P 500 quite well. If the government can only return 6% on its stock investments, you might as well stay in bonds because the return is about the same. The part I find most unsettling about the Clinton proposal is that he failed to mention to the American People (your broker could go to prison for this) is that the Federal Government has been "borrowing" this surplus and it is not invested in anything anyway. In fact, if you remove the income from the social security trust fund that the government has "borrowed" and spent, the Federal Government is still running in deficit spending mode this year. I am rather disappointed in the Republicans for not having the spine to tell the American people that the budget really is not yet "balanced". Anyone who does not believe me can look at either the chart that is supplied with your 1040 tax form which explains where the money comes from, and where the money goes, or you can log onto the IRS web site and find that the government is still borrowing more money to cover our disgraceful budget deficit. -John