On Wed, 7 Aug 2002 at 5:24pm Nathan Newman wrote:
>
> Clinton never proposed privatization. He did propose
> supplemental individual retirement funds that would
> receive heavy subsidized tax credits for working class
> folks
-Aren't those called 401k's or IRA's and weren't you -criticizing them a while back?
Clinton VETOED the creation of the Roth 401Ks they I railed against a while ago, which have become law under the Bush tax plan. What Clinton proposed were what he called USA accounts, individual accounts to supplement social security that the government would susidize for low-income individuals. This proposal was the progressive inverse of 401Ks, which concentrate tax benefits for the wealthy.
Here is an Urban Institute analysis of the proposal: http://www.urban.org/retirement/briefs/8/brief8.html
This proposal was one of the best made in the Clinton administration and it is intellectually lazy to ignore the specifics of the proposal in order to make the ludicrous claim that it has any resemblance to the rightwing privatization proposals bandied about.
-- Nathan Newman