Dear President Bush:
I recently wrote to you considering your social security phase-out plans. In doing some additional research, I came across a paradox that I wanted to share with you in hopes you might change your mind.
Your plan to create “personal” private accounts within Social Security is heralded as a way to “save” the program from projected funding shortfalls. But in reading about the program, those projections are based on pessimistic ideas about what growth in the U.S. would look like. Likewise, your accounts would generate a 7 – 10% return annually, based on optimistic projecctions of US returns over time. But some economists, who are clearly smarter than either of us on this topic, have said that if the rosy scenario turns out to be true, there won’t be a shortfall in Social Security at all. But then that would mean that if the pessimists are right on the Social Security projections, the stock market wouldn’t make your 7 – 10% annual return, either.
So, really, private accounts won’t make any difference at all in fixing the projected funding shortfalls in Social Security. Which makes me think this isn’t all that good of an idea, and that it won’t really help the average person at all.
Therefore, I have to ask you once again to stop pushing an agenda that clearly won’t help the citizens of this country, and, in fact, will do far more harm than doing nothing.
Thank you for your time.
Chris