> John K. Taber wrote:
> >
> > Subject: Re: Radio Doug
> >
> > Doug said:
> >
> > Thanks. I wish I'd had the details behind his assertion that today's
> > workers will get a negative return from their SS taxes. I suspect they use
> > preposterously high real interest rates to deflate the value of future
> > benefits
>
> Wouldn't it be better to hammer the point that SS is _not_ an investment
> program, and that talking about "rates of return" is absurd? It seems to
> me that once you start arguing over interest rates, present value and
> all of that you habe implicitly conceded the debate; in the public mind,
> "stock market" and "highest rates of return" are indelibly one and the
> same. And the privatizers have the numbers behind them, at least until
> the bubble bursts.
This is what I routinely do.
But there's more: it was the conservatives who originally insisted that SS *NOT* be an investment vehicle. It's very important to make the point that it wasn't a liberal plan to set things up this way -- it was the result of negotiations in which liberals got the plan through, but not in the form they originally envisioned.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"