Deficit Issues

I'm sure that both of these had something to do with government support in the forms of exempting mortgage interest from taxable income, and exempting 401(k) contributions from taxable income, respectively.

Which is another way of saying that Americans like liberalism a little bit more than you think they do.

 

Of course, this point of view is greatly dependent on where you draw the demarcation lines between "liberalism" and "conservatism." If you see "government giving nudges to people to encourage them to do The Right Thing on their own" as being part of liberalism, as I do, then yes, those things are liberal ideas. On the other hand, if you only see liberalism as "government uber alles," then I guess you won't see those things as liberal ideas.

 

But that's the thing. I don't think you'll find too many liberals advocating a "Social Security and nothing else" approach to retirement savings. For anyone to say so is not dealing in reality. It is merely a baseline, a safety net.

And for DuPont to say that liberals think that "the 1935 Social Security system is perfect and nothing about it may be changed" is slightly more defensible, but only slightly. Of course, things have to change -- it's going to go broke within my lifetime otherwise. However, the devil is in the details.

DuPont and others of his ilk (which I would presume to include most of the readers of this forum) think that the details should include privatization of the Social Security system. However, as an employee of a company whose stock price has dropped 95% since 2000 and is currently under investigation by regulatory bodies in two different countries for cooking the books, and as someone whose inlaws know far too many former Enron employees, I'm not sure that that safety net is better off in the hands of "the market" than the federal government.

We agree that Social Security needs to be fixed, but we differ in the implementation.

HSAs have been around for several years and have had little effect on the number of uninsured Americans. They sound good in theory, but they've never moved into the "works well in practice" arena.

Now, I guess that DuPont would immediately claim that I'm clamoring for socialized medicine, which would sound good in a column, but be about as accurate as his "liberals don't want to change anything about Social Security" thesis. I think that our market-based healthcare system is the best in the world in most cases, but more should be done to broaden the number of cases for which that is true, especially for working Americans. Right now, there are too many working Americans who have no health coverage. A good start would be to strengthen the tax incentives for employers to provide health coverage to their employees, especially part-time employees.

 

But I'm arguing that government support of a program in the form of reduced taxes is in fact government's imposing its will on people (in this case, telling people "you should save for old age").

In my admittedly liberal way of thinking, a conservative would argue that government's got no business encouraging or discouraging savings and investment.

 

Now who's confusing political labels? The latter statement is something that socialists would spout, not liberals. To be fair, you did say "at its extremes," but c'mon, that no more represents mainstream liberalism than John Birchers represent mainstream conservatism. Let's make a deal: You don't try to stick me and my ilk with whatever crazy-ass socialist idea that was probably cooked up by some 30-year-old career college student that was on some website somewhere, and I won't lump you and your ilk in with whatever crazy-ass idea that the John Birch Society or David Duke or whoever comes up with.

(As for your former statement, I've heard many people across the political spectrum decrying the lack of tax breaks for renters. But most of those people live in urban areas with high housing costs.)

You've told me nothing new there. It's something that we all agree upon.

My wife's grandfather was an avid investor. He wasn't rich, and he wasn't a daytrader, but he did by stocks. And he almost exclusively bought blue chips and utilities. Why? He was a safe, conservative, cautious investor. And when he died several years ago, my in-laws inherited his investments.

One of his major holdings that they inherited was a utility known as Pacific Gas and Electric. He was from San Francisco and they were his power company, and hey, what could be safer than the power company? Everybody's always going to need electricity. They enjoyed consistent, safe, slow growth and they paid a nice dividend. Good, safe, conservative investment.

By now, you're seeing where I'm going with this. Thanks to the idiotic implementation of electricity deregulation in California, PG&E became a very crappy investment in 2001. But my greater point is that "conservative and cautious" investments can go as badly as investing in a dot-com. And it's one thing if those investments (like in that one brokerage commercial) mean the difference between upper deck seats and box seats down at the local ballyard.

The question is whether you want to subject the safety net of Social Security to those same forces. I don't. You could possibly convince me otherwise if you were to constrain the investment choices to those based on government bonds and if you were to have the federal government guarantee a minimum payout.

Not exactly the privatization you might be hoping for, but hey, it would at least keep me from going around scaring old people that you were wanting to put their retirement money in the hands of Ken Lay.

Well, you're not. But the number of people who are is a little bit (just a little bit) larger than "zero."

You THINK you can do better. I THINK I can do better. Granted, it's a safe bet, but as The Wolf said, "Well, let's not start sucking each other's dicks just yet." ******** happens.

First, an aside. What is the Right's fascination with the senior Senator from Massachusetts? I'd really like to know, since it's always puzzled me, and since it appears that he's passing the mantle of "Bete Noire of America's Right Wing" to the junior Senator from New York.

And while you may not be enamored with entrusting part of your retirement savings to the assorted drunks in Washington, I'm not terribly enamored with entrusting old people's financial safety net to the assorted crooks and shysters on Wall Street.

Never mind that that doesn't address how Social Security became a Ponzi scheme in the first place. But of course, that would require basing Social Security on an actuarial table from the present, rather than one from 1955 or 1935, and adjusting the retirement age accordingly. Which would of course cause AARP to fight such a proposal tooth-and-nail. Well, assuming that they can divert their attention from hustling old folks to buy their insurance plans long enough to do so.