About eight years ago, the Bush Administration launched an effort to "reform" Social Security by "privatizing" it. The idea was to shift employee payroll contributions from the federal Social Security trust fund to private, individual "retirement accounts" - giving them the ability to make their own decisions on "investing" their contributions and magically creating much larger retirement funds.
But Josh Marshall, head of the then fledgling Talking Points Memo (TPM) knew the flaws in the plan: First, once you stopped the full flow of funding into the federal fund, the amount of federal money available to pay benefits to those now retired or soon to retire would begin to shrivel. There was no way you could make that transition smoothly.
And secondly, aside from the change being a glorified gift to Wall Street through diverting this massive flow of employee contributions into the open market, it would be inherently risky. What would happen to those retired or about to retire if the market tanked and wiped out significant portions of their retirement fund? And how much would Wall Street skim off in the form of fund management fees?
So Marshall set forth on a mission. Details below the Orange Romney Ryan Medicare Plan logo.