Bush on Social Security

[Renfield]

And the Republican plan solves any of these problems how exactly?

The numbers I posted in another thread show that the Republican plan even with a private account produces benefits lower than a do-nothing plan.

It amazes me that Bush can constantly imply that the thing is going to rescue social security and solve all its problems, and this is hardly questioned. Where is our "liberal" (har har) media when we need it?

Not to mention its not going to perform nearly as well as Bush would like to think (wait until it comes time to start awarding contracts to brokers and whatnot to administrate the thing). Cha ching. Another chance for corporate America to cash in with this administration.

 

[BPSCG]

I'm not saying I have any simple solution, but that I can't seem to find a way TO the solution that threads through the needle of a private stock market account.

Well, under my CSRS system, I can also put money into Uncle Sam's version of a 401(k) (what's called the "Thrift Plan"). I currently pop 7% of my gross salary into it because I don't trust you GenXer's to support me in my retirement in the style to which I've become accustomed. They managed to set that up with very little trouble, back in 1984.

The FERS system transitioned federal emplyees in 1984. People hired after 1983 were mandatorily covered under the new system. People hired before 1984 had the option of joining; some did and some didn't. Seems to me that if that process for transition to a new system worked for federal employees, why should something similar not work for the nation at large? (FWIW, the federal employees' health care system is another very effective model, and I can't understand why it hasn't been offered to the rest of the country).

The part of the whole thing that nobody seems to be addressing is "what happens when the stock market goes down?"

It goes down. What's the big deal? It's not like you're putting your entire life savings into the market the year before you retire; that would be madness. But putting a small percentage of your salary into a stock fund over a period of thirty or forty years is almost guaranteed to be a better bet than the return you get on SS. Betting that the stock market will be higher in twenty years has always been a winning bet - even in the twenty years that included the Great Depression. Putting money in the stock market is betting that America will be more prosperous tomorrow than it is today.

I've been putting money into the federal thrift funds (there are five of them altogether, but I've been putting most of it into the common stock fund) for twenty years, and even when you factor in the recession years, and even when you factor in the post-dot-com-bust and the post-September 11 crash, I'm still way ahead of where I'd be if I'd just been sticking the money in a CD getting two percent - which is about what the estimated return on your Social Security "investment" is.

Yeah, if I'd put a bunch of money into the market on January 1, 2000, and withdrawn it on December 31, 2001, I'd have gotten clobbered. But do you know anyone who's planning a work career of 24 months?

SOME years retirees WILL LOSE under Bush's plan.

No federal employee who's invested regularly in the thrift plan over the last five, ten, or twenty years, has lost. Again, you'll have some years that are better than others, and some individual years where your total valuation will actually drop. But over the long haul - and that's where we're all working - putting money in the market will pay off better. It always has. Why should you believe it will be any different in the future?

And so what then? A huge taxpayer bailout. It's not politically tenable to have a stock-market correction when that correction drops granny's safety net below the poverty line and she has to eat cat food.

Again, you're assuming that Granny invested her life savings in the market the day before she retired and the market crashed the next day. It doesn't work that way. If you're going to argue that one bad year on the market will force Granny to live on cat food (BTW, Star-Kist tuna is cheaper than Fancy Feast, so if granny's eating cat food to save money, she's an idiot), then you should also argue that one good year will enable her to live on filet mignon. Again, it doesn't work that way.

 

[BPSCG]

Not to mention its not going to perform nearly as well as Bush would like to think (wait until it comes time to start awarding contracts to brokers and whatnot to administrate the thing). Cha ching. Another chance for corporate America to cash in with this administration.

Do you own any mutual funds? I'm guessing no, because if you did, you'd know that fund administrative expenses generally run under one percent. The federal thrift plan I've referred to in other posts here typically has expense ratios of a fraction of a percent. There's no reason the administrative costs of any privatization program should be any different. If you think otherwise, I'd like to know why.

 

[Silicon]

(FWIW, the federal employees' health care system is another very effective model, and I can't understand why it hasn't been offered to the rest of the country).

Yeah, I seem to remember a presidential candidate promising something like that in the last election... what was his name? Kerr....something. Anyway...

It goes down. What's the big deal? It's not like you're putting your entire life savings into the market the year before you retire; that would be madness. But putting a small percentage of your salary into a stock fund over a period of thirty or forty years is almost guaranteed to be a better bet than the return you get on SS.

Especially if you're reducing the amount that people are paying INTO SS. That's the problem with the Bush plan. Sure, you get better money back for YOUR MONEY, but those gains are offset by a smaller SS check than if they did NOTHING, so you're taking away almost as much money as you're putting in, or if the Stock Market doesn't perform as well as the rosiest prediction, you lose three ways. You lose once for the current predicted shortfall, you lose more for the carveout, and you lose yet again from the stock market dip.

This account isn't an add-on, it's a CARVE OUT. Which means you better not just make up more money in your stocks, you need to get by with less, because the workers during YOUR retirement will be paying less into the system than if we did nothing. Then the government will confiscate any earnings you make with "your" money below the rate of T-bills, and will pay you anything you make over that with an annuity if you aren't financially stable anyway, and that expires at death. It's only transferable at death if you were rich enough to not actually need it.

Betting that the stock market will be higher in twenty years has always been a winning bet - even in the twenty years that included the Great Depression.

No.

Those people retiring in 1932, assuming they had been investing their money in the Dow since 1912, saw all of their earnings evaporate.

And that's exactly the problem. People can't always choose when to retire. Your back goes out, and your working days may be over. And those poor slobs retiring during a downturn just lost a big chunk of their safety net.

Putting money in the stock market is betting that America will be more prosperous tomorrow than it is today.

The current Social Security system bets on the same prospect. If payrolls go up, payroll taxes do too, Social Security remains solvent.

Yeah, if I'd put a bunch of money into the market on January 1, 2000, and withdrawn it on December 31, 2001, I'd have gotten clobbered. But do you know anyone who's planning a work career of 24 months?
No federal employee who's invested regularly in the thrift plan over the last five, ten, or twenty years, has lost.

Are they able to take earnings out of that for safety and diversification? Buying bonds, gold, real estate? Just a question.

Again, you'll have some years that are better than others, and some individual years where your total valuation will actually drop. But over the long haul - and that's where we're all working - putting money in the market will pay off better. It always has. Why should you believe it will be any different in the future?

I don't doubt it. But I do know a few things:

Social Security isn't just a retirement plan for old people. It's also a life insurance, a disability insurance and a survivor support plan. So people will be putting money in and recieving benefits with a shorter turn around than 40 years. In fact, the people who need it most.

People's stock valuation depends on the year that they claim it. Assuming that this system has already been in place, someone retiring in 2001 would be retiring with HALF the money that their brother retired with in 2000. That's politically untenable. People would storm the gates.

You might argue that he's doing great, or somehow better than before. If that's the case, WHY have ANY social security, why not invest it all? If it's a "sure thing" high reward/low risk, then why doesn't the Republican plan guarantee a floor level of support?

And if we DON'T guarantee a floor level of support, can we really call it Social Security?

 

[BPSCG]

Yeah, I seem to remember a presidential candidate promising something like that in the last election... what was his name? Kerr....something. Anyway...

Don't remember his bringing it up - probably got lost in the noise about his Vietnam service. Anyway, it's still a good model.

Especially if you're reducing the amount that people are paying INTO SS. That's the problem with the Bush plan. Sure, you get better money back for YOUR MONEY, but those gains are offset by a smaller SS check

Right - but the idea is that you'll more than make up the difference by investing the money elsewhere. It's not particularly hard.

Look at a couple of stock funds I picked out here. Look at the "since inception" performance. I didn't pick them out at random; they're funds I own myself:

T. Rowe Price New Horizons (click on the "Performance" tab).

This is Putnam's Voyager class A fund (too many click to get to the page, so I'm putting it here for you):

Inception Date: April 1, 1969
1-year average performance (as of 12/31/2004) 4.79%
3-year average performance -1.35%
5-year average performance -9.13%
10-year average performance 9.10%
(Performance since inception not available online)

I'm no stock-picking wizard, by any means; back in the 1990's, it seemed like you could get rich by selling anything I bought (I rarely buy stock any more, except through my automated mutual fund purchases and thrift plan allotments). These are a couple of funds I bought after a little research on the part of the Price one, and on the advice of a friend on the second. And when you think of all the hundreds (thousands?) of mutual fund companies out there, finding funds that have 40-year records of 10% average annual returns is no great trick.

Those people retiring in 1932, assuming they had been investing their money in the Dow since 1912, saw all of their earnings evaporate.

Okay - looks like you're right on that one, though you had to cherry-pick pretty hard to find it; it looks like that's just about the only twenty-year history for which you could say that - if you'd started at 1911 or 1914, for example, instead of 1912, my claim would still hold true. Note also that if you take the graph out just another five years, to 1937, the Dow had recovered about 2/3 of what it had lost after the 1929 crash.

And you know that if you put the rest of the chart in your post - the post-1945 period, your readers would have to scroll off the screen to see how well the Dow's done since 1945

And that's exactly the problem. People can't always choose when to retire. Your back goes out, and your working days may be over. And those poor slobs retiring during a downturn just lost a big chunk of their safety net.

That's true - it is an issue - what happens to the guy who gets crippled in an auto wreck at age 24? . Maybe Social Security should be changed to strictly a disability program? Just thinking out loud here.

But don't kid yourself that SS will take care of you just because, as you put it, "your back goes out." SS pays disability benefits only for severe, permanent disabilities. If you're 24 and your back goes out, you will almost certainly not qualify for Social Security disability, because SS defines a disability as an illness, injury, or medical condition so severe that it will keep you from doing any substantial gainful activity (SGA) for at least a year or cause death within a year. The definition of SGA was insanely strict when I left SSA in 1988 - if you could do work that paid you $300 a month (not a typo - that's three hundred, not thousand), then you were not disabled. Your 24-year-old construction worker making $40,00 a year would almost never be considered disabled due to a bad back, because he was young enough to be retrained for lighter work. If he was 55 years old, with a 6th-grade education, he'd have a better chance, but even then, it was at best, 50/50.

The current Social Security system bets on the same prospect. If payrolls go up, payroll taxes do too, Social Security remains solvent.

You keep on believing that. As I said, I've got my civil service retirement, so it's not my problem if you're wrong.

Are they able to take earnings out of that for safety and diversification? Buying bonds, gold, real estate? Just a question.

Not really. There are five funds (started in 1984 with only three):
Government Securities Investment (G) Fund
Fixed Income Index Investment (F) Fund
Common Stock Index Investment (C) Fund
Small Capitalization Stock Index Investment (S) Fund
International Stock Index Investment (I) Fund

Employees can allocate their contributions as they wish, and redistribute as they wish (when getting close to retirement, you'd probably want to move money out of the C fund into the less-risky G fund; I haven't, myself, but I'm an idiot...)

You'll notice there's no "Enron Fund" or "Martha Stewart Fund" or "Russian Oil Companies Fund." The politicians screaming that "your grandma is going to starve when her Enron investment tanks!!!" are using scare tactics. These funds have dozens (hundreds?) of diversified investments, so even when one goes belly-up, it doesn't kill your whole investment.

To see how these funds have performed, click here.

Browse around the federal thrift site while you're there, then ask yourself why everyone doesn't have something like this.

Social Security isn't just a retirement plan for old people. It's also a life insurance,

The "life insurance" payoff is only $255.00, and it only goes to your surviving spouse.

a disability insurance

I've discussed some of the limitations of that above.

and a survivor support plan. So people will be putting money in and recieving benefits with a shorter turn around than 40 years.

Some - not most. There's no question some people get far more out of it than they put in. But the system doesn't guarantee anything like that. It can't guarantee anything like that, because it's physically impossible to do; if you were to try to make such a claim, you'd end up in jail for running a Ponzi scheme.

People's stock valuation depends on the year that they claim it. Assuming that this system has already been in place, someone retiring in 2001 would be retiring with HALF the money that their brother retired with in 2000.

Don't know where you get those numbers. Yeah, my investments took a pounding in 2000/2001, but I didn't lose anything remotely resembling half my savings.

That's politically untenable. People would storm the gates.

Would they? If they recognize that markets have short-term ups and downs, but that long-term, it's up, as long as America remains a productive, prosperous country (and if it doesn't, there will be because there are a lot more, severe problems going on than just a SS funding crisis), the trend will remain up.

You might argue that he's doing great, or somehow better than before. If that's the case, WHY have ANY social security, why not invest it all?

There are those who argue that that should be more than just a rhetorical question.

If everyone could count 100% on their children to take care of them when they grew old (think of the Amish), we wouldn't need Social Security. Unfortunately, not everyone has children, and some people have children that should be taken out and shot (Mrs. BPSCG and I are in the former category, just for the record...).

If everyone was disciplined enough to save ten percent of their salaries every single paycheck for thirty or forty years, we wouldn't need Social Security. Unfortunately, there are way too many people who aren't even disciplined enough to brush their teeth every day, let alone save their money.

So Social Security, in some form or another, is going to have to be with us for a long time - until either everyone has children who will take care of them in old age, or everyone provides for their own old-age security.

Well, you can't make people have children. But privatization is the first step toward the second situation - people taking care of their own retirements. But that's a long way off, so until then, each generation is going to have to depend on the next generation to support it. The demographic problem, however, is that the "retired" generation is going to get bigger and bigger, relative to the "working" generation, and that means an increasing burden on the "working" one. I've explained this before - Social Security has had a thirty-year history of benefit cuts and tax increases, and the only alternative the opponents of privatization offer is - more of the same. How long do you think your so-called "guaranteed" benefit is going to last when your children, thirty years from now, decide enough is enough?

And if we DON'T guarantee a floor level of support, can we really call it Social Security?

I think I've answered that question above.

A question for those who say, "Just raise the tax a bit and cut the benefits a bit":

Sometime in the next fifty years, scientists are going to be able to significantly increase life expectancy. They're going to find ways to turn off whatever part of the DNA sequence that causes aging.

What happens to Social Security when grandma retires at age 67, and collects Social Security benefits until she dies tragically young in a whitewater kayaking accident at the age of 347?

 

[Frank Newgent]

Well, under my CSRS system, I can also put money into Uncle Sam's version of a 401(k) (what's called the "Thrift Plan").

Be on the same payroll as you?

The administrative costs of the TSP are held in check by several factors: investment choices are restricted; the system is quite large, and investments are bundled and made centrally; and all covered workers operate under the same payroll system, which simplifies recordkeeping. In addition, all records provided by the employing agencies are in electronic form.


http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=5277&sequence=3&from=0

Fuhget aboudit!

 

[BPSCG]

Be on the same payroll as you?

Sure - get yourself a government job!

Fuhget aboudit!

Okay, that was articulate. Now what's your specific objection? FWIW, two million feds like the current setup we have. Mrs. BPSCG, a private sector employee with good benefits (pension, health insurance, vacations) is quite envious of it. Of course I'm envious of her salary, so it goes both ways...

 

[Frank Newgent]

Now what's your specific objection?

Dubious that a privatized Social Security will necessarily have low administrative costs. Invoking the Thrift Savings Plan means little since all covered in that system operate on the same payroll, simplifying records.

Wok fer da gubmit anyhew? Ha!

 

[BPSCG]

Dubious that a privatized Social Security will necessarily have low administrative costs. Invoking the Thrift Savings Plan means little since all covered in that system operate on the same payroll, simplifying records.

Okay, but the remaining 200 million people who don't work for the government operate on about ten million different payroll systems. And yet, Social Security's administrative costs are also less than one percent of the gross revenue. Why do you think the current system can do it but the proposed new one can't?

 

[SlippyToad]

Implement those measures and watch the economy go into a 1970's style nosedive.

Ah, and the 1970's economy was caused by, what, exactly? Oh yeah? The high price of oil!! I forgot.

I also forgot that I grew up in the 1970's, and was really not that conscious of an economic catastrophe going on around me. Neither did I grow up wealthy, before you start on that. My dad sold car parts.

But if you want to start throwing around bullschist doomsday predictions about taxes and the economy, you should get off your plump hind end and read a little bit about what tax rates were, historically, and how the economy ran when they were higher. I have completely lost patience with people who just, as another poster has plainly stated, make crap up and hope no one will notice. Just recently, Clinton raised taxes in order to keep the goernment's financies in order. In contrast to the anguished howls of conservatives, the economy proceeded to boom mightily. And don't drag out Reagan for me and proceed to make up some crap about his contribution to the 1990's economy. Puhleze.

Right now, our economy is still sucking wind. Job creation remains pathetically weak, consumer confidence is down, foreign investors think Bush is scary, and our fiscal house isn't in order. We are killing our budget with interest payments on Reagan Debt plus Bush Debt and we've got precious little to show for it. Bush has clearly demonstrated he lacks the political cojones to cut spending where it matters, so his tax cuts remain an absurdity -- tax shifts into the future. When the house of cards that is his administration collapses, we will have to jack the rates up for all those people who've been getting the gravy for eight years, and they'll all cry and pule and moan that economic Armageddon is coming, and they'll be as wrong as they were last time.

 

[SlippyToad]

Those people retiring in 1932, assuming they had been investing their money in the Dow since 1912, saw all of their earnings evaporate.

And that's exactly the problem. People can't always choose when to retire. Your back goes out, and your working days may be over. And those poor slobs retiring during a downturn just lost a big chunk of their safety net.

This is the part that kills me, personally. Where the ◊◊◊◊ have you people been for the last five years? Seriously? I watched in a kind of dull amazement as people at my company divested themselves of their corporate stock ni the 401K like rats deserting a sinking ship. This wasn't in some black-and-white movie I saw -- it was happening right around me! How can people be taking privatization seriously NOW of all times? I could see people in 1999 doing it. But today? Get outta here!

 

[jay gw]

Here's what you need to know to compare Social Security and privatized accounts

- what is the average return on X dollars for SS over X years
- what is the average return on X dollars for privatized accounts over X years
- what are the fees for SS over X years
- what are the fees for privatized accounts over X years

I've heard that the fees for SS, because it's public sector, are less than 1 percent. The fees for privatized accounts are 5 percent! That translates to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees over 30-40 years. You would have to earn a huge return in order to make up that difference.

For example, if SS accounts earn an average of 3 percent, you would have to earn, over the life of the privatized account, and average of 8 percent - just to equal the SS account! That's because you're subtracting the 5 percent fee.

This data is readily available, maybe I'll try to find it, but everyone here who really wants to know the difference should be seeking it out. You're just arguing from ignorance.

 

[jay gw]

Ok, here's a starting point

Say you work 35 years. You earn $45,000 a year, same income each year.

The SS tax rate is 6.2 percent for you and 6.2 percent for the employer.

That adds up to $5580 a year.

Over 35 years, that's a total contribution of $195,300.

Here's what I found about the returns on Social Security accounts:

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his fellow commissioners include a chart with rates of return for various workers. A single, medium-wage male worker born in 1970 will receive a 1.13 percent rate of return. A same worker born in 1980 will receive a 0.91 percent return. The same worker born in 1990? A 0.86 percent return.

A two-earner medium/low wage couple with 1970 birth dates will realize a 2.24 rate of return. The same couple with 1980 birth dates will receive 2.08 percent return. A couple with 1990 birth dates? A 1.88 return.

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/david_reinhard/index.ssf?/base/editorial/11057941459420.xml

So basically if that's accurate and you were born in 1970, you can expect SS to deliver about a 2.24 percent return.

That means that of the $5580 contribution per year, you're earning $125 in interest at 2.24 percent.

I can't do the compounding because each year you're figuring the interest on top of what you already earned the last year and the last, and so on. Someone good at statistics will have to do that. I think Excel has a formula to do that.

But after 35 years, what would you end up with with SS?

 

[jay gw]

So if you start the first year making $5580 in contributions and earn 2.24 percent interest, you end the year with $5705.

Add $5705 to that each year, and after 35 years you have $199,675.

 

[Frank Newgent]

Okay, but the remaining 200 million people who don't work for the government operate on about ten million different payroll systems. And yet, Social Security's administrative costs are also less than one percent of the gross revenue. Why do you think the current system can do it but the proposed new one can't?

Have read that Social Security has administrative costs of about 7/10 of 1 cent of every dollar that comes in. It achieves such low administrative costs because all Social Security tax dollars are reserved to pay benefits only, along with administering the program.

No Don King butt pirate brokerage houses slipping you the willy.

 

[Shinytop]

So if you start the first year making $5580 in contributions and earn 2.24 percent interest, you end the year with $5705.

Add $5705 to that each year, and after 35 years you have $199,675.

Two words for you sir, compound interest. The 5580 earns interest for the entire 35 years, the next 5580 for 34 years, etc. Your figure of total earned is much too low. A very simple Excel spreadsheet, adding interest only annually instead of monthly or per paycheck yields a result of 316, 480 dollars. I am not an accountant or mathemetician but I am sure this figure better reflects the actual money.

 

[jay gw]

Here's the story of the private account system in Chile
Chile has had private accounts for over 20 years

The United Nations Program for Development 2000 report on Chile shows that at least half of the six million workers in Chile will get no benefits for retirement - except possibly $35 per month in welfare.

Another 25 percent, low-earners who contribute regularly to their individual accounts, will have to rely on the minimum pension guaranteed by the government ($130 per month for anyone contributing to their individual accounts for 20 years). This minimum pension is but 75 percent of the poverty level minimum wage.

As bad as the private pension system itself is, nurses like Adriana know that the situation for retirees is much worse because of the privatization of national health care, the other central part of what was Chilean Social Security.

She's run into numerous older people like Luis and Margarita Vargas. Retired under the old Social Security system, they saw their benefits frozen and cut under the dictatorship. Margarita's cancer operation, which would have been fully covered under Social Security, left them deeply in debt.

"We've been shafted," Luis said.

The shafting began after a 1973 military coup, backed by President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and unleashed a reign of repression with many thousands of union activists murdered, "disappeared," imprisoned and tortured.

Proponents of privatization like Pinera, who served as Minister of Labor under the murderous regime, claim that private pension accounts have delivered "double digit returns" since they were started.

But both the UN report and a study done by a Chilean brokerage firm, CB Capitales, showed that fees ($4.5 billion 1982-98) ate up a big chunk of the savings.

Thus, the real rate of return in the individual accounts has averaged but 5.1 percent since 1982, according to the investment firm. Workers would have done better just putting their money in 90-day certificates of deposit (CDs), which have returned 7.2 percent annually.

A young worker starting out in 1994 would have lost 6.6 percent per year through 1998. With the money in CDs, their savings would have gone up 42 percent.

The private pension companies have raked in $808 million in profits, with 20 percent profit rates even in years when the account holders lost money.

Not surprisingly, investment and insurance companies are among the heavy contributors to the campaign to privatize Social Security in the United States. Under the Bush proposal, companies would reap $240 billion in commissions in just the first dozen years, according to the AFL-CIO.

Perhaps Chile's former military rulers knew what was coming: While forcing the private system on the Chilean people, they kept both Social Security retirement and national health care benefits for the armed forces and police.

http://www.revolutionmag.com/newrev6/chile.html

Here is a study on the Chilean private account system from the International Social Security Association.

The rate of return to the fund is less than 6 percent a year.

http://www.issa.int/pdf/mexico03/2villegas.pdf

 

[Lurker]

BPSCG:

Been enjoying your posts on this topic immensely. Thought I would throw in a few comments about fees. As mentioned SS pays 0.7% fees which is pretty low.

I would imagine the privatized system would cost MUCH more? Why? You have investment options which means you need to have a system to handle people changing their investments. Individually this needs to be handled somehow. Perhaps you can seel assets too and invest them in another option similar to how our 401K systems operate. That also would increase cost over the current SS system.

Further, when you retire, despite what Bush is saying about it being your money to pass on to your family I heard that it really is not. You are forced to buy an life-time annuity which again increases the cost of the program.

The annuity makes sense as if it is *your* money and you unwisely spend it all, will the govt sit back and watch you starve to death? Annuities are a way around this dilemma.

Lurker

 

[Silicon]

BPSCG, I don't think you've addressed my core points.

The main one being that yes, stocks do go down. You seem to be saying that "on the whole, they do well."

I agree. On the whole. But not ALWAYS. Not 100% of the time, and I think it's dangerous to rely on that good fortune when we're talking about Social Security. Without a guarantee floor level of benefits, SOME people will be worse off than the worst case do nothing plan.

To quote the blogger Atrios,

"While long run investors can ride out the storm of a bad couple of years on the stock market, the Bush plan doesn't allow for that possibility. Long bear periods do happen. In 1987 the S&P crashed 20% in one day. If that happened on the day when you hit 67, you'd be pretty upset."

 

[Lurker]

Since BPSCG seems quite sure that over any 20 year period hte stock market will easily outperform the current SS system, would he endorse adding a guaranteed minimum return for the private accounts similar to what SS gets currently?

That was we all are winners as we do better than SS and it costs the govt nothing since we *know* we cannot do any worse than current SS returns.

Lurker