Why Oh Why Are We Ruled by These Idiots? (Yet Another Social Security Edition)
Now the Republicans have stopped pretending that even they think their Social Security proposals would be good for the country. Matthew Yglesias reports:
TAPPED: June 2005 Archives: THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS. Well, the House leadership... a variant of Social Security privatization whose irresponsibility is so prodigious as to beggar the imagination... private accounts... but only out of the Social Security surplus... bizarre... slightly horrifying. Every American will get an account, but the amount of cash in it will be tiny -- $400 to $600 a year... administrative fees... an enormous percentage of account value... by 2018 or so the accounts will just go away along with the surplus.
In the meantime... massive increase in the government's unified deficit... adverse impact on economic growth...
As Jason Furman says, it's 'the worst of all worlds,' with 'all the problems of any private accounts proposal with none of the benefits for solvency.'
Republican strategists... open... ploy to try and force Democrats to negotiate some kind of deal... putting something... catastrophic on the table in the hopes that Democrats will thereby agree to a pernicious but non-crazy plan.... It'll also be interesting to see if the... press who've spent the past 15 years greasing the skids for privatization... wake up and realize the folks they've been supporting are out of their minds. I won't be holding my breath...
