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Drooling on the Pillow

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Speak For Yourself, Nitwit 

Many critics of Social Security reform have hinted as much, but Richard Cohen in his Washington Post column today comes right out and says it: Americans are too dumb to make investment decisions on their own for their retirement.

From his point of view, I guess this makes sense. After all, Americans were dumb enough to vote George Bush back into office. Lets keep sharp objects and 12.5% of their income away from them.

Well.

He goes on to make an extended, painfully extended analogy between WMD and the Social Security "crisis" (scare quotes his) contending that the administration could not be trusted on the one and shouldn't be trusted on the other.

Let's allow him the analogy, but look at it in a different way. Critics of the war, those who believed it was the wrong war at the wrong time were implicitly making the case for the status quo ante. "Of course Saddam is a monster, but . . ." They allowed themselves to believe sanctions were working, that the international community was having an effect and that the U.N. was the proper forum to settle the matter. Two years latter there remains much more evidence that there were, in fact, WMD than for these three contentions.

Of course, Social Security isn't going to blow up tomorrow. We could wait ten years. Or twenty. And then what? Richard Cohen has the answer. Raise taxes on the "rich" (scare quotes mine). So we put off reform until the whole thing is ready to tumble and the plan is to throw 2 trillion in new taxes into an economy that's decades away. What if it happens to be during a recession? What if any one of a hundred factors make this unworkable?

Why don't we just buy a lot of lottery tickets?
Posted by: Sluggo / 10:13 AM
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