Bush Social Security VS Regular Social Security

This comes via the Center on Budget and Policy Proposals but it uses nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office figures. This report is long and filled with confusing, boring figures, but the meat is in the innocently titled "Table 2," about a third of the way down. Basically, under the Dear Leader's Social Security plan, a person who chooses to use one of Bush's vaunted "personal accounts" can expect to lose 33-50% of their benefits versus the current social security system. And that's if the market does OK. It could do really well, true, but it could also do poorly. What Bush failed to mention last night is that the money in personal accounts IS NOT YOUR MONEY. You have to pay it back. All you get to keep is any extra money your private account earns above and beyond the 3% it would've earned if the Social Security Administration had kept the money in their own accounts. So if you earn 5% on it, great, but if you earn only 1.5%, whoops, now you OWE SSA money. And since it will cost lots of money to set up and manage these accounts, EVERYONE will get their benefits cut, across the board, not just private account holders.

This is a stupid idea. Social Security might need to be tweaked to keep it going and deal with our aging population, but this "fix" doesn't fix anything. It creates new problems and cuts existing benefits while offering little in return.