Truth Be Not Told

I read George Will's latest column in Newsweek and was immediately struck by the intellectual dishonesty that he displayed throughout, particularly due to the fact that Will packages his image to be that as a truth-telling intellectual, down to the bow-tie and obscure historical facts.

But before I could write on it, the incomparable Josh Marshall beat me to it, raising the same point I was going to raise about the fallacious comparison being made between Social Security and federal employees' Thrift Savings Accounts. Of course the Thrift Savings Accounts are comparable to a 401k plan, NOT a guaranteed insurance program like Social Security. Marshall notes:

One of the most misleading comparisons President Bush made in his State of
the Union address came when he compared private accounts carved out of Social Security to the Thrift Savings Plan available to employees of the federal government.
Now George Will has picked up the cudgel, combining this bogus
comparison with the now de rigueur demonization of Sen. Harry Reid, who scares
Republicans.

Will attacks Reid for not supporting Bush's plan, while at the same time participating in the Thrift Savings Plan, ignoring the obvious fact that, as Marshall points out, the Thrift Savings Plan ("TSP"), just like a 401k plan, operates for Reid ON TOP OF Social Security, not instead of it:

Who will make the obvious point?

No federal employees put their Social Security funds into the TSP. The TSP
is in addition to Social Security. To the extent that there is an analogy to
anything it is to an add-on account -- the kind Democrats support
and Republicans oppose. Indeed, the TSP is little different from private
sector 401ks, a defined-contribution retirement plan.

Indeed, no less an authority than the Social Security Administration says: "The TSP is a defined contribution plan similar to the 401K plans offered in the private
sector. Contributions are made by payroll deduction. Both the money that is
contributed and the interest earned are tax-deferred."

Let's give Will the benefit of the doubt and assume he's just ignorant
rather than intentionally misleading. Democrats don't think people shouldn't
invest in private securities as part of their retirement planning. What they say
is that that should be in addition to Social Security, from which workers get a
flat guarantee of a base level of retirement income.

The question isn't why everyone shouldn't have the chance to get in on the
Thrift Savings Plan. The question is why everyday Americans should have to
choose between Social Security and the TSP when federal employees now get to
have both.

The point is simple and no more complicated than the elementary concept of
diversification in an investment portfolio. Ideally, retirement planning should
include multiple sources of income: the guaranteed, threshold level of income
provided by Social Security, private savings and an employer-based pension. Each
has different levels of risk involved. One key importance of Social Security in
this mix is that it is the one part of the equation in which there is a flat,
no-matter-what guarantee.

Will also ridicules Reid for comparing the President's plan to "roulette":

This is the crux of the Democrats' argument against Bush's plan: Equities
markets are terribly risky—indeed, are as irrational and risky as roulette.
Think about that. Roulette is a game without any element of skill. By
comparing the investment of some Social Security funds in stocks and bonds to
gambling on roulette, Reid is saying that the risks and rewards of America's
capital markets, which are the foundation of the nation's economic rationality
and prosperity, are as random as the caroms of the ball in a roulette
wheel. This, from a national leader, is amazing.

Again, Will is using his rhetoric to mask the true issue. Social Security is a social insurance program -- the aim of insurance is to reduce risk. As we have it now, Social Security will provide a guaranteed benefit to recipients, regardless of the vagaries of the stock market. Bush's plan would subject to the potential recipients to unneeded risk, just like, yes, roulette.

Finally, Marshall is absolutely right that Will's attacks on Reid are both over-the-top and unnecessary. In particular, I was taken by Will's denouncement of Reid's rebuttal to Bush's State of the Union address, which Will criticized because -- unbelievably -- it was "written before the [President's] address." What Will fails to note is that EVERY rebuttal to the State of the Union is written before the address itself is given -- the Republicans did the same thing during the Clinton Presidency. By trying to create impropriety where there is none, Will shows his true stripes again. But what should we expect from someone who praised Ronald Reagan's performance in the 1980 Presidential Debate against Jimmy Carter without revealing to viewers that he had prepped Reagan for the debate using a stolen Carter briefing book?

- posted by Joshua @ 1:08 PM