The New York Times Editorial: The Social Security Fear Factor

The only hands-down winner would be Wall Street, as fees to manage millions of accounts poured in. (Those fees, not incidentally, would come out of your return.) Current stockholders would also stand to benefit, as increased demand pushed up stock prices, giving existing owners a gain at the expense of newcomers who would be forced to buy high. The affluent, who could afford professional investing advice, would also be advantaged, even though everyone would be taking the same risks. …

If Mr. Bush were not so serious about privatizing Social Security, his urgency would be silly. Compared with other challenges looming for the government, it’s a non-problem. The shortfall in the Medicare hospital insurance fund is two to three times the size of the Social Security shortfall, and that fund is projected to be insolvent some two to three decades before Social Security. Taken together, the costs of the Medicare prescription benefit and of making the tax cuts permanent – Mr. Bush’s two main domestic initiatives – are 5 to 8.5 times larger. And his hair is on fire over Social Security?

It must just be an odd coincidence that Duhbya’s top contributors in 2000 were from the Investment Industry. It can’t be as simple as a payback, can it? As for Medicare, in much more immediate trouble than Social Security, well, hell, he fixed that last year. mjh