Gosselin and Chen on Bush's Strange Trip to Ohio
Particularly strange is Trent Duffy's hiding from his telephone--and the fact that Trent Duffy appears to be the only person who knows more than what was in Bush's excessively-skimpy talking points.
They write, in the LA Times:
Bush Points to a Retirement System With Mixed Results. By Peter G. Gosselin and Edwin Chen, Times Staff Writers: KIRTLAND, Ohio — President Bush came to Ohio on Friday to highlight a state retirement savings system that he said showed that Americans would be better off handling their own old-age investments through personal accounts than relying on traditional Social Security. But that state's version of personal accounts has attracted few takers among the people eligible — Ohio's 750,000 public employees. And records show that the most widely chosen version of the state-offered accounts has racked up a five-year earning record of 1.86%, about the same return that the president says Social Security produces.
"Boy, does he have a hard sell ahead of him in using Ohio as his example," said Keith Brainard, research director of the National Assn. of State Retirement Directors, which represents virtually all of the nation's public employee pension plans. "Ohio's individual account programs are only a few years old, and in the short time they've been around, investment returns have been relatively weak." Brainard said. Coming two weeks before the end of his "60 Stops in 60 Days" campaign to convince the nation that Social Security needs to be reshaped, Bush's Ohio appearance illustrated the difficulty the president faced in promoting his plan to a nation edgy about a still-uncertain economic recovery and a stock market that had taken a steep dive in recent days. Bush has proposed allowing workers under 55 to divert a portion of their Social Security taxes into private stock and bond accounts. In return, they would agree to a cut in their traditional Social Security benefit.
The president has said the private accounts should be part of a broader plan to shore up the shaky finances of the Social Security system. That broader, still-undefined plan might include further benefit cuts or tax increases. But several recent polls show the president's proposal losing ground amid concerns that private accounts would require Americans to shoulder more economic risk for the possibility of a greater reward....
Part of any Social Security fix, the president told his audience, should be "to trust people with their own money, to devise a system that would work similar to the state of Ohio, that would say, 'We're going to let you earn a better rate of return for your money.' " But in the biggest of Ohio's several state retirement programs, the popularity of the private accounts and the returns they produce are relatively low. Ohio is one of half a dozen states that have begun to offer 401(k)-like retirement accounts through which eligible employees can invest in a handful of state-screened mutual funds or other portfolios.... The state began offering the private accounts to state college faculties in 1998, and extended them to other workers early in this decade. Ohio has five major retirement systems for teachers, police, firefighters and other public employees.
It was unclear from the president's remarks and from an administration-issued news release which of the five plans Bush was discussing in his appearance Friday, or what option he was focusing on. The White House referred calls to spokesman Trent Duffy, who could not be reached. But in the biggest of the state's plans — the 522,000-member Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, or OPERS — the personal account option has not proven particularly popular among state workers, or delivered a particularly good rate of return. About 10,000 of those eligible for personal accounts — less than 5% — have signed up for the accounts since they became available at the start of 2003, according to Laurie Fiori Hacking, OPERS' executive director...
