A truly excellent catch by the NYT’s David Rosenbaum. The Social Security Administration’s website has a large set of Questions and Answers. One of them goes as follows:
Question: I think I could do better if you let me invest the Social Security I pay into an Individual Retirement Plan (IRA) or some other investment plan. What do you think?
Answer: Maybe you could, but then again, maybe your investments wouldn’t work out. Remember these facts:
- Your Social Security taxes pay for potential disability and survivors benefits as well as for retirement benefits;
- Social Security incorporates social goals – such as giving more protection to families and to low income workers – that are not part of private pension plans; and
- Social Security benefits are adjusted yearly for increases in the cost-of-living – a feature not present in many private plans.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. As Rosenbaum points out in his NYT story, this answer could hardly be less consistent with the line that W has been pushing for the last few months.
One imagines that this particular section of the Social Security website will be receiving a lot of traffic today. And it will be interesting to see if this Q and A survives for long in its current form. There is a "notify me by email if this answer is updated" button that I have signed myself up for, so if there are any "updates" to this answer, I’ll let you know!
It’s interesting to see that for once there is inconsistency between the messaging of the White House and federal agencies. Either some feds are sick of being used as extensions of the administration’s Rove-Political shop or the sloth-like pace of the Bush-bureacracy cannot keep pace with the ever changing political whims of an administration where policy is sacrificed for politics every time.