NY Times:
Overhauling Retirement Is Worth Risk, Cheney Says. Mr. Cheney, my retirement account is only now approaching recovery from the last catastrophic stock market drop. Many retirees are still suffering. Peddle your science fiction elsewhere.
Comments:
I believe folks would be investing that portion of SSI withheld.
Yes but this still does not inject any new initial investment dollars and does assume that less educated people—given the correlation between education and earnings—will be able to match “historical levels of returns.”
Well, the Republicans would prefer to keep the working classes down; they believe it’s necessary for a healthy economy.
Krugman’s been pointing out the fallacy of this argument from day one. It seems totally unlikely to me that someone working at 7-11 is going to have the time - not to mention the skill or good fortune - to outperform a standard SS-style fund. It simply doesn’t make sense that, in general, this is going to benefit anyone in the lower & lower-middle classes. And I’m not clear on how it’s going to benefit the rest of us, either.
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
Cheney’s comments on how people earning low wages would benefit from private accounts, not included in the Times article, make no sense to me. Here’s the key quote from the AP version:
“Many low-income workers who have nothing to spare after taxes would have a chance to begin saving for their later years.”
Since everyone already has some amount withheld from their paycheck for this purpose, and no proposal that I’ve read calls for increases, how can this be true? Of course, the cynic in me assumes that Cheney’s speech is simply part of the Administration’s strategy of lying to get the desired result.
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