Private Accounts, Public Accountability

[rodeodance]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/22/opinion/22mayer.html?th&emc=th

April 22, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Private Accounts, Public Accountability

By MARTIN MAYER

SO few specifics of President Bush's Social Security proposal have been made public that it is difficult to say which will make trouble. But one person who should be seriously concerned about the details is Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve.

According to many reports, the Bush plan would require retirees who have chosen "personal accounts" to use most or all of the money in those accounts to purchase annuities to supplement the payments that will remain after the government recalculates their Social Security benefits. How large an annuity that retirees can buy - and thus what standard of living they may expect - will be determined largely by interest rates set by the Federal Reserve. That's a lot of power to concentrate in one conference room on Constitution Avenue.

A simple annuity provides its purchaser with a certain amount of money every month for the rest of his or her life. The Bush annuities would have to be more complicated and expensive, because their payouts would have to rise with both the cost of living and the poverty threshold.......



....Apart from the inflation question, however, there is an even more complex issue: the percentage of a retiree's personal account that would go toward buying the annuity. That percentage could fluctuate substantially over the year, so someone who retires in April could wind up with significantly higher or lower income from someone with the same portfolio who did not retire until October........

[xchrom]

1. the whole thing is hogwash

and every time i hear of a new {screwed-up} detail -- i get pissed that wing-nuts continue to sell this bag of shit.

can you imagine -- there's the initial bill -- then there's a major fuck-up, then there's the revised bill, with it's follow up debacle, more hearings, more rules and regs, more costs, etc.

there's nothing about this that is supposed to be advatageous to average americans.