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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

This article has some good points, but it is also mired in the same sort of 
'trust fund' double speak that clouds the real issue:


> A few weeks ago I tried to explain the logic of Bush-style Social Security 
> privatization: it is, in effect, as if your financial adviser told you that 
> you wouldn't have enough money when you retire - but you shouldn't save 
> more. Instead, you should borrow a lot of money, buy stocks and hope for 
> capital gains.
> 
> 
In liberal speak, not taking SS money from taxpayers is the same thing as 
them borrowing it from the government.  It looses sight of the fact of whose 
money it was to start with.

Yet most of what the article has to say is well said.  The Bush plan is 
shrouded in just as deceptive language as the present system.  It's not a 
personal 
account he's proposing at all, you don't own it.  You only own whatever it 
might earn over and above the 3 percent it would have (fakely) "earned" 
[wink, 
nudge, nod] if it had been left in the SS system.  If it doesn't, and it's a 
big 
gamble, you get nothing more than you'd have gotten had you stayed in the 
system, and under some circumstances, a lot less.  Yet the same sort of low 
IQ 
who now thinks that SS funds are stashed away somewhere in a trust fund are 
now 
going to think that they have money in some sort of personal account.  We're 
about to trade one bogus system for another bogus system.

> 
> Translation: If you put part of your payroll taxes into a personal account, 
> your future benefits will be reduced by an amount equivalent to the amount 
> you would have had to repay if you had borrowed the money at a real 
> interest rate of 3 percent.
> 

Eh, unfortunate way to word it, but essentially true.  The 'loan' part is 
still liberal-speak.  More accurate would be to say, "... your future 
benefits 
will be reduced by an amount equivalent tot he amount you have had to pay had 
some goon been extorting it from you and promising you 3% as the result of a 
Ponzi scheme that he was never going to be able to deliver on..."

> 
> Do you believe that we should replace America's most successful government 
> program with a system in which workers engage in speculation that no 
>  

Successful?  From whose point of view?  A person who holds up convenience 
stores with  gun and gets by with it probably views his enterprise as 
successul, 
those robbed don't.  

James