<"If the left actually gave a rat's ass about whether or not the elderly had a decent retirement system, the arguments in favor of privatization would impress them, and they don't:"

Social Security, the most popular social program going, was created by left-wing Democrats very nearly over the dead bodies of conservatives. And nourished by the left.

How can you say "if the left actually gave a rat's ass"? I'm serious - what's the reasoning there? Where did that idea come from? Are there any more ideas in the same place?



Damn. Sometimes this is like teaching a fish to ride a bike.

The fact that it was created by the left, which is no surprise to me, has nothing to do with what I said, which is that their motivations for creating it were the accumulation of government power, not making sure that the elderly had comfortable retirements. The justification I gave for this assessment was that the superiority of almost all private retirement alternatives to Social Security is totally ignored by the left, and any concepts proposed that would give the elderly any private options at all are firmly opposed by the left.

Third, it was designed to be supplemental and guaranteed, not the investment with the best return. And as such, it pays for a lot of things which aren't direct benefits to you. If you die, right now, your wife and kids would get Social Security. Not a whole bunch, but something which could be supplemented. A slam dunk.



It's clearly not the best, or Federal employees would have to contribute. But privatization wouldn't make it better.



If it's supposed to be "supplemental," you might want to clue the Democrats in on this, who constantly hammer on how the elderly would all immediately die in their tracks if Social Security benefits were cut back even slightly. Sorry, but whatever Roosevelt's original intentions, Social Security is now treated by politicians as though it were the sole lifeline of a vast group of the elderly.

As for privatization not being better, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. How about entertaining the radical notion of actually giving me a frigging choice on what I want to set up for my retirement? Put the gun down, huh?

The cute bit about Federal employees being exempt should have been a warning bell from the very start.

Fourth, did you watch the Enron folks talking about being broke now that the stock collapsed? What that did to their retirement?

This leftist myth is now firmly in place, so I doubt this will make any impression, but most of the people who "lost money" in Enron lost mostly paper money that they saw rapidly shoot up in their accounts--to which they could have contributed a maximum of about $10,000 a year--and rapidly fall down. Paper profits. Not their life savings that they put in and suddenly saw disappear. So if you see someone griping that he had a million dollars, and now he has about $20,000, well, that's about what he contributed in the first place. All the rest was just gas.

Believe me, as someone who bought tech stocks and watched them fly for a while before nosediving, I know something about this.

Secondly, except for a short window of time, there were no restrictions on Enron employees diversifying away from Enron stock and spreading their accounts out. Face it: most of them filled up with Enron stock and rode the wave because they thought they were making a killing. Damn few of them will admit it now, of course. Granted, the executives sold at a high point, and didn't clue the employees in that they were about to take a dive, but the fact that most employees were unwisely overloaded with Enron stock in the first place was greed, not because they were forced to.

...And wealth isn't being created by privatization except in the form of driving up the cost of stocks without adding value to them. Wealth for the wealthy is being created, not wealth for the economy. I know, trickle down. You know what else "trickles down"? And on whom, the "tricklee", so to speak? And who the "trickler" is?



I just don't see it except as another rich-get-richer scheme which is made to sound attractive to the middle class.



Money in the private sector grows. Money in government just gets passed around to buy votes. A dollar in the hands of an enterpreneur does more for for the economy than a million dollars in Ted Kennedy's hot chubby fists. The corrollary to this, of course, is that every dollar kept out the hands of the government is a net victory for all of us.

And while you are entertaining your nineteenth-century fantasies about the "rich," you might want to make note of how many middle-class people are also stockowners, either by themselves or through pension plans.

A state not long ago had a property tax initiative. Limits on property tax. Stampeded many of the middle class, it passed.



Well, the property tax is possibly the fairest. There are tax loopholes available to the rich, but they usually own property.

Guess what. Large corporations and the wealthy saved a bundle. The tax losses were made up from increasing fees and taxes on the middle class.



This would probably be Proposition 13, and as a middle-class homeowner among many, I heartily supported it and still do. The state government, who like most governments believes that every nickel left in my own pocket represents a major failure on their part, has been wailing about Prop 13 for years. Various legislative attempts to sidestep it or neutralize it by propositions over the years have fallen to defeat at the polls, which seems to indicate that most California voters agree with me.

And yes, there have been attempts, successful and otherwise, to smack us with fees from other directions, but this says more about the bloated California government trying to grab what's left of my wallet than it does about low property taxes.

And again, as far as Social Security is concerned, how about letting us choose for ourselves for a change?