When Bush first touted his social security plan he came up with the brilliant idea of people investing in “certain allowed stocks”, purchasing up to 3 different stocks out of the vast selection of the hand picked choices of 4 or 5 companies the government would allow us to invest in. How quaint. And whose companies would the people be allowed to invest their money in, those owned by the Bushco and friends? And who is to say they won’t tank once they rip off the little guy. We have seen this before.

Also unworkable. The more people buying into a limited number of questionable choices, even if successful, will result in less dividends for everyone as it would have to be divied up among too many for anyone benefit from it. Also there is no guarantee these stocks would be successful as even experienced people loose everything at times, some never recover.

If McCain thinks this is a doable thing, it shows how out of touch he really is.

Another reason when Bush first came up with this idea, most companies will not even talk to you unless you can start out with an investment of $50,000.00, a very few will allow a start of $10,000.00. It takes money to make money. Most people I know do not have that kind of money to start out with, let alone can afford to risk it on a questionable gain. Also one would need to start at a fairly young age and have been investing for at least 30 years. (I have relatives who have done very well at this and know what they are doing and I also have another relative who also know what he was doing and did very well until he lost everything a few years ago in the stock market).

Blacksphere,

My former employer DID actually offer this on a volunteer basis, and about a decade or so ago, if I remember correctly. I didn’t bother with the ‘counseling’ offered at the time, to see ‘which would be best’ for me, since it was somehow being offered as a ‘one or the other’ type thing.

(This was long after they’d begun the 401K’s that basically did the same thing, but one needed to pay into the federal system at the same time).

If the success of the 401K’s is any indication of the success of the market based SS funds, I would be very leery, despite what seems to be an ‘overall’ success of the stock market over the past several decades.

I know far too many people who’ve invested over those same decades, who’ve now lost damn near everything. Maybe they ‘picked’ the wrong stocks, but in the case of most of them, it’s not because they were spending like crazy. (one guy is such a miser he should be in the world record book of misers) and yet…all gone.

The middle to low income American is far too afraid to invest in the market without some measure of expertise, and even the ones who believe themselves to be experts still lose.

And now we see that the Feds are having to ‘back up’ the market? Nope, I don’t think privitized SS is gonna be seen as any better an idea now, as it was when Bush tried to push if off on us, if only because it’s far too easy to manipulate.

Ergo…the coming DEPRESSION that they’re trying to pass off as a possible ‘recession’.

Of all Bush’s proposals, privatizing SS is probably the best.  However there are some constraints.  In order for privatizing to work it must be done over the long term.  The stock market over the decades has done remarkably well and though there are periods of recession overall the market always makes money.  It’s only in the short term that money is lost.  For the working individual who invests in a privatize SS fund for 30-40 years, that person will reap huge benefits more so than with the current payout of SS system.  The advantage of a privatized system is that upon the death of the individual all the funds are inheritable.  With SS now the surviving spouse get only a percentage.  The downside is that the current SS payout is neverending while a privatized fund is finite, but after 30-40 years of investment there should be quite a nest egg unless you spend like crazy.  What they should do is offer a privatized SS fund on a voluntary basis and allow people to invest as much as they want as long as it’s pretax money.

Bravo ocjim…

Thanks for this very excellent analysis, and for the link to his voting record.

I’ve been searching for such a link to compare several others.

Thanks again…

Actually she is a gene-spliced cross between a human(?) and a snake, just like Mukasey, in fact they are identical twins.

The John McCain of today is not the John McCain of eight years ago. Simply put, his maverick bent is bent. He heroically withstood the tortures of the Viet Cong prison. But his thirst for the power of the presidency gives him an expeditious bow to Bush and an awkward allegiance to Republican dogma.

Thus, there is a dissonance to John McCain, his campaign and his speeches. It reminds you of the opening strains of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Warped video: discordant music, slow-motion distortion of form and meaning.

Just when his foreign policy speeches start to make sense, one suspects that neocon propaganda twists his reason toward rants: claiming that Democrats are selling out to al Qaeda dominance.

Neocons still own the Republican Party, and to be its candidate McCain must balance on the beam of Bush peace propaganda, fear-mongering, and the Bush war against terrorism.

My recent memory of McCain, Iraq, and Iran is this succession of scenes: his charge of Iran training Al Qaeda, an almost real-time correction by Joe Lieberman, then McCain substituting the word extremist for Al Qaeda, then McCain changing the word again to Al Qaeda. I must admit that I guessed engagement in an outright lie (in the Bush tradition), but then wondered about a senior moment.

Now, we all remember the media’s pardon of George W. Bush’s sophomoric speeches, lauding his achievement relative to his usual mediocre performances. The media also helped to paint Bush as moderate and bought his compassionate conservative tripe when most of us knew better.

Once upon a time he decried the Bush tax cuts. Now he votes to extend tax cuts on dividends and capital gains, an action that will worsen the budget deficit while mainly benefiting people with very high incomes. How will he balance the budget and maintain our $3 trillion war? By getting rid of pork-barrel earmarks, he stated, which are molehills next to the mountain of Bush debt. One wonders if he misleads or is ill-informed.

If you are among the 4 million homeowners who are tanking, hide your heads and emulate the 76 million who are “working a second job, skipping a vacation and managing their budgets.” McCain failed to directly chide Countrywide Financial or Bear Stearns.

Economists and objective analysts who have watched unregulated financial markets drag the world’s economy into the muck of their own greed-fest, must be getting whiplash trying to follow the seemingly uninformed illogic of McCain’s proposal to de-regulate more.

Our tanking economy shows that the invisible hand (free market in Adam Smith terms) that neocons tout seems to be held (constrained / broken / monopolized) by irresponsible people, financial markets and consumers alike. We should not hold our breath for his solutions.
Even on social issues the maverick vein is gone. McCain once called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell “agents of intolerance.” Late last year he met with Falwell and since then his positions seem friendlier to the religious right. A case in point is his support of an extremist anti-abortion law in South Dakota.

Like Bush, McCain is trying to appear moderate during his general election run, which he gets to start early due to the winner-take-all Republican primaries. And like Bush, the media permits him to play the pretend game of being a moderate.

If the media bothered to check his voting record it would find the truth. A statistical analysis of Mr. McCain’s recent voting record, available at http://www.voteview.com, ranks him as the Senate’s third most conservative member.

If due to the prolonged battle for the Democratic nomination, McCain manages to prevail, it would truly be a case of Bush III, somewhat of a Bush clone, just as plutocratic, just as warlike – maybe even more, and just as ignorant about the economy and economics.

We have all seen what the privatization of the war has cost America. Jobs once done be the soldiers by and for themselves, are now done by “private contractors, paid outrageous prices to “private companies” for a formally free part of the job of being a soldier. Can you even begin to imagine how the privatization of social security will actually cost the retired workers if this nightmare begins. The retiree, will no doubt, be slapped with all kinds of handling charges and newly created fees for imagined services, much like the phone and gas and electric companies do now, and will end up paying millions of dollars for the CEO’s over inflated wage. In the end, the only ones with the money will be the corporate monsters created by this disaster.

And don’t be surprises if this nightmare becomes reality, that those in charge of all this money, suddenly declare some type of collapse and disappear with the money, leaving those who depend upon it to survive high and dry. Think Enron, etc.

If the PTB had not been stealing from the til all these years past, they would not need to try to find a way to “hide” the theft and by privatizing social security, then allowing for the fall, which will happen, and those responsible will Not be held accountable, not as long as it is a republican administration anyway, they think they will be home safe and that the taxpayers won’t realize the money was never really there at all. Some people are not as dumb as these crooks had hoped for. If it is working now, and it is, leave it alone. Besides, everything the current commander in chief has run for a business has failed, including America and with John McCain blindly following the ideas that Bushco has dreamed up spells total chaos, as Bushco is always wrong.

Apparently McCain isn’t getting those heavy-duty campaign contributions from the traditional Bush-type, mega-buck Repub fat cats.  (Can’t run a viable campaign these gloomy days without a ton of money - as we all know but continue to do nothing about.)

For the Bushies, government is their personal sugar-daddy.  Until McCain can convince them that he agrees, they’ll keep their money in their pockets.

It would seem that his goal was to get nominated - not to actually become president. He is such a disappointment.

Since Hillary has been promoting McCain I feel the need to vote for him. For some reason, I see him being less Republican than she.  Both will fill the White-house with little change.

McSame is such a silly way to criticize McCain. How about HillaJohn McClintain?

what if in 2000 McCain was promised the “heir apparent” 2008 job if he would go quietly and not make a fuss (along with a more private promise that if he DID make a fuss, he and all his family would die—-the “offer he couldn’t refuse”) . . .

What then would the other stipulations have been? Well, to start with, he’d have to promise that he’d support ALL of the bad ideas of the Bushitter gang of thugs, and he’d have to be the same kind of President as Bush, one who would DO AS HE IS TOLD without question.

He has on occasion created the illusion of some space between himself and the worst of the Bushitter ideas, but in the main this man has agreed with and otherwise supported nearly every one of the worst ideas coming from the Bushitter gang of thugs—-note please that I do not say “come from Bush,” and I don’t because Bush is intellectually incapable of making ANY decision, let alone difficult presidential ones, and surely is nothing but a puppet for some secret cabal which presents its orders to Cheney in his “secret location.”

The debacle which was the moron trying to explain “his” ideas about privatization of SS ought to have been enough for anyone to realize that the moron was a moron after all, and not really president, but it seems that no one wants to admit that the USA which covets, lies, murders, and steals also has a puppet president doing what a secret cabal orders him to do.

It’s not that I make tinfoil hats; it is simply the only explanation for Bush which makes any sense at all, and the only explanation for McCain accepting and rejoicing in all of the WORST ideas of the Bushitter gang of thugs.

Reiterating the two verities: 1. it’s about oil, and 2. Bush is a moron. Accept the pair and you have a logical explanation for nearly everything done by or for the Bushitter gang of thugs.

“Privatizing” Social Security would not, necessarily, be the same thing as dumping all the IOU’s in the Social Security Trust Fund into the markets.  Other countries have nominally privatized, publicly controlled Social Security systems.

How will the government explain to post-Boomer citizens that all the money they put into Social Security got used up? (If that is what happens?)

“McSame” is trying to woe a base that doesn’t necessarily like him very much.  And since he still doesn’t have an opponent, he’s still basically in nomination mode. 

There exists a very real possibility that if McCain were to become president, he’d return to the “maverick” McCain and govern from the center.

I won’t vote for him to find out, but i won’t be overly shocked if a McCain presidency is a lot different than what the Left fears.

Based on recent comments from the Senator Clinton, she’s not so far from the McSame position on privatization of Social Security either, though she calls it ‘reform’. (I hate that word in the mouths of politicians, especially real repugs and repug-lites in DLC clothing).

Anyway, Hill claims that she won’t mess with anybody already receiving it, but I don’t trust it.