Thompson's got a plan for Social Security. Sort of.
Fred Thompson offered a proposal today for dealing with Social Security's anticipated meltdown, and it includes a plank likely to draw fire from the conservatives he has been courting since before he made it official (though he has banged this drum before).
The plan: Provide a federal match for private investments in an ancillary 401(k)-style savings account. Individuals could contribute up to 2% of their monthly income and receive the federal match. Thompson offered no estimate of how much that would cost. But it would not allow workers to opt out of the Social Security program itself -- a linchpin for those advocating independent retirement accounts.
Thompson also called for indexing future benefits to changes in the price of goods rather than to wages, though he offered no estimates of what sort of savings that might lead to. But he said it would not affect people age 57 or older (he earlier put that level at 60).
Significant here is the general lack of details. Thompson offered these four bullets of goals:
* Leave Social Security benefits received by current retirees and those near retirement completely unchanged and fully preserve their annual cost of living adjustment. No one now over the age of 57 will be affected.
* Preserve and strengthen Social Security for future generations of Americans and guarantee the current benefit structure, fully protected for inflation.
* Increase retirement options for today's workers -- and future generations -- by giving them the option when to retire and allowing them to build wealth they can pass on if they so choose.
* Completely eliminate the estimated $4.7-trillion unfunded Social Security liability over the 75 year actuarial planning horizon and leave Social Security permanently fiscally sustainable.
But the proposals he offered say little about how he would achieve those goals. Why create too many specific targets for your opponents to shoot at? But, for instance, how would this plan "preserve and strengthen" the system? The proposal would seem to do more to help those who can afford to build their own retirement funds than it would to resolve the projected Social Security deficit.
-- Scott Martelle
Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
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You wrote: Significant here is the general lack of details.
Um...no.
Significant here is the fact that you based your entire synopsis of Thompson's proposal on the press release announcing his proposal, and not the actual proposal.
I'd be looking for a tuition refund from whichever institution was charged with teaching you the basics of journalism, if I were you.
Thompson's proposal is over four pages long. There's simply no way you read it all.
Not even close.
Posted by: Bruce | November 10, 2007 at 12:33 PM