Tuesday, March 01, 2005

David Bradford on Social Security reform

On this day when I am trying to serve David Bradford's memory via the WSJ piece that I mentioned in my previous post, I thought it might make sense to give his views on Social Security reform, which I know pretty well because we frequently discussed these issues.
David's biggest concern about U.S. fiscal policy, although it wasn't the main focus of his writing, was the fiscal gap. He was beginning to worry about the nightmare scenario of a capital markets meltdown with hyper-inflation and the like, but by far his main concern (a bigger issue to him than to me) was future generations, whom he felt we were treating unfairly. For this reason, he thought it vitally important to slow down entitlements growth and increase national saving.
Although he called himself a Republican (I told him he was a Rockefeller Republican), David actually liked the Social Security system the way it is, apart from the generational transfer, lack of pre-funding, and likely adverse effect on national saving. That sounds like a lot of objections, but what I mean to emphasize is that he liked the basic structure of offering people a mandatory fixed real life annuity, which he thought all sane people would want in their portfolios. Thus, he didn't think much of the privatization (oops, sorry, surely I meant to say "personal accounts") idea of replacing this system with another set of debt-financed risky investments that people can make on their own anyway.
Although he refused to accept quite so negative a view of the Bush Administration as that which I generally urged on him, feeling that it was still politics as usual and that the Democrats would comparably have blown up the fiscal gap, he did consider the Administration's current push on Social Security a complete waste of time at best, and possibly another disaster in the making like Medicare prescription drugs. He would have liked it, however, if all the rhetoric about solving problems now and providing for the future had actually been linked to a policy proposal that pointed in that direction.
One last point about David and the Administration's fiscal policy is that he didn't think they actually passed tax cuts in 2001 through 2003. To him these were simply tax shifts, to be offset later, given the fiscal gap, either by tax increases or by effectively retroactive reductions in transfers that might look different from tax increases in form but would be similar in substance.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

We recently purchased the domain name 72q.com and are taking a poll to determine what type of web site to develop for this domain. Please submit suggestions to webmaster@72q.com.

72 Q

Anonymous said...

annuity health sell is something I can't say enough about.Salaam, Meg annuity health sell

Anonymous said...

Hey Fellow, you have a top-notch blog here!
If you have a moment, please have a look at my make money while site.
Good luck!

Anonymous said...

I was searching blogs,and I found yours.Please,
accept my congratulations for your excellent work!
If you have a moment, please visit my best life insurance rate site.
Have a good day!

Anonymous said...

Great blog on linkreferral. I've stumbled on a superb money making website. Linkreferral is free to join and drives traffic to your website in an inivitive way (the more sites you visit, the more links you get back to your website.)

I've only been a member of Linkreferral for aproximately 2 weeks but I have already seen the volume of people coming to my site double - if not treble.

Linkreferral is not only driving visitors to my website but as a result my affiliate sales income has doubled also.

I really cannot push this website enough. It is free and it is fantastic!! www.linkreferral.com is a must for money making opportunities online.

Anonymous said...

Good blog - very interesting!! Thought you might like some excellent advice on driving extra traffic to your website/blog - I'm into balancing load server web and to drive traffic to my website I was searching around the internet for absolutely ages looking for SEO tools to fire my site up the Google search engine, then I signed up free for this superb traffic gereating tool - I now have loads of hits to my websites/blogs and my site is shooting up the Google rankings quicker than ever before.

Consequently this can see your affiliate commissions shoot through the roof - meaning lots of extra money coming in for you and your family. Sign up now - it's free.
. Sorry if this information is of no use to you but seeing as you have the anonymous feature enabled I thought I should share this free bit of essential promotional advice with you and would hope you would do the same for me.

I hope the tool will serve you equally as well as it has me!!

Best of luck, cheers for now, dave.