For reasons I'll mention in a moment, I really don't want to get the Social Security debate going full-blast on this webpage or in my e-mailbox. But since I linked earlier to a Democratic "calculator," I thought I ought to link to a Republican-type one. Folks sent me links to this one and this one and this one, and I have no idea which is the most accurate. I suspect none is truly accurate since the Bush plan still seems to be so unformed and lacking in specifics and likely to change.
That's one of the things that makes me suspicious of the arguments in its support…and no, it doesn't work the other way around. If someone proposes a new plan — especially one involving numbers — a perfectly valid criticism of it is that it is vague and incomplete. It seems to me the administration strategy at the moment is to get a lot of folks to pledge loyalty to the proposal, then to work out the specifics later. It's like signing a contract to buy a house and the realtor says, "Don't mind those blank pages in the middle. I'll fill them in when I think it's time." To some extent, we bought the War in Iraq on that basis, if only with regard to its predicted costs. Given how far wrong this White House was with those dollar estimates and how they keep revising the prescription drug plan costs upwards by tens of billions, I don't think they've earned a lot of trust with regard to financial projections.
And then the other thing that makes me suspicious of the Bush proposal for private/personal accounts is that the sales presentation for it seems to be predicated on just plain, old-fashioned lying about the health of the current set-up. It doesn't seem to me to require major surgery. Yeah, it may run a deficit at some arguable point in some upcoming decade. Of what current Federal programs could that not be said? Come up with a plan that will fix all of them and you could probably turn Social Security into a chain of soup kitchens for all I'd care…but right now, I'm afraid of seeing Social Security "fixed" by people who've spent years dreaming of its elimination. The only thing that will convince me is a lot of hard math that doesn't make wild projections about the stock market in the future, and provides a workable Plan B if even the reasonable forecasts are wrong. When George W. Bush talks about not wanting to "lay all [his] cards on the table so my opponents can take a shot at them," I figure we're not going to get that for a while, if ever, and what he finally does propose will be amended and compromised and quite unlike the undetailed wish-dream of Conservatives and Wall Street now being bandied about. So that's why I don't want to spend a lot of time debating the proposal. If you want to without me, be my guest.