Ever Since They Dropped Analogies From the SATs...
...a few people seem incapable of forming appropriate ones. From Pandagon:
Jesse Taylor - March 11th, 2005 Progressivity is an important part of public policy - but only if the policy itself would be a good idea. Giving out vials of anthrax would be a bad idea - adding progressivity to the distribution process wouldn't make it any better of an idea.
What is this scourage that Taylor likens to antrhax? Why, it's none other than Bush's proposed personal savings accounts for Social Security.
Hello Mr. Taylor, I'm perspective. I don't think we've met.
But wait, there's more:
Jesse Taylor - March 11th, 2005 Privatization does not do anything for Social Security, and adds trillions of extra dollars to the deficit.
This is misleading. It merely shifts the debt from one time period to another. The so-called "transition costs" are not actual costs, in the typical sense of the word. They refer to the short-term borrowing that needs to be done to fill the time gap; the actual money, however, is not going anywhere. It's simply being used at a different time.
Taylor's primary gripes seem to be deficit-related. He talks about them as if they spell certain doom, despite the fact that a) we've run higher deficits before, when inflation and the size of the economy is taken into account, and b) the CBO projects that the deficit will get smaller before it gets larger. This is the same CBO which has overshot its deficit projections the last two years; in one case by nearly $80 billion.
And all this assumes that the deficit is something to be worried about in the first place; which has by no means been established.
To Taylor's credit, he at least seems to accept the obvious, demonstrable fact that there is a problem, and that it needs to be dealt with somehow. I don't see anything in the way of real argument against it, however. No examples of its alleged riskiness that cannot be easily cured by a shift from one form of asset to another over time.
» March 14th, 2005
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