How much freedom would you like to see people have in the management of their “private” accounts?

I’m also not certain what Raj was saying, but I took him to be referring to children that weren’t from his immediate family.

I thought that he was suggesting that it’s ok to demand that other people’s children pay for his retirement, because he has to pay for other people’s children’s education.

And who is going to reimburse me for paying for having to be required to pay for the education of children who are not our’s–tye children who might be expected to pay SS for us?

I’m not sure what you are getting at here, but how are children from Thailand any less “your” children than children from Oklahoma, or Florida, or Nevada, or any other State you don’t currently inhabit? What does it mean to say that the latter children are “our” children while the former children are not?

I’m just pointing out that the “SS is an essential safety net for everyone and cutting guaranteed benefits will leave old people starving in the streets!” bit is demonstrably wrong. What makes me want to tear my hair out every time I see a mainstream-media debate on SS is the obvious, enormous dishonesty on *both* sides.

Is it moral to force people to save?

- Josh

By privatization of Social Security do you mean abolition? Because the moral argument is for abolition, isn’t it?

Many of us support the *idea* of private accounts, but worry that the implementation of them will cause more financial problems than they solve.

Until these concerns are addressed, Social Security reform, and more importantly, Medicare reform, will never happen.

The recent NYT magazine article on the topic, written by an obvious left-wing opponent of SS reform, inadvertently makes this point while trying to make the opposite one. He says that if SS were abolished tomorrow, 48 percent of the elderly would be in poverty. But this means that slightly over half of SS recipients do not need SS payments to keep them out of poverty. And since people who earn more get higher SS benefits, that means that probably significantly *more* than half of all SS dollars now go to recipients who do not need that money to keep them from being poor!

Now the standard leftist response to this seems to be essentially, “yeah, but if we didn’t make middle-class elderly people into welfare dependents, the program wouldn’t be so popular, and eventually the now-unbribed middle class would vote to cut off even the poor elderly.” The problems with this argument are:

1. welfare programs for poor people have not in fact gone away in America and are not going to, though they were curtailed somewhat by Clinton’s reforms;

2. the people who make this argument also claim (see e.g. monkyboy’s third point above) that private accounts won’t work because those who get poor returns will be bailed out anyway, since it will be politically infeasible to just leave them to their fate.

BTW, the NYT article is at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/16/magazine/16SOCIAL.html?oref=login