Bill Thomas misleads on Social Security

From Tuesday's Washington Post, here's Rep. Bill Thomas (R-CA):

"The one thing people should not be concerned about is that in creating personal accounts you are going to exercise any significant risk," Thomas said at a town hall meeting at California State University at Bakersfield. "It will be structured in a way that you can get the benefit without a serious risk of losing money."

And here's the Post's report on an analysis of Bush's plan by Yale economist Robert Schiller:

Nearly three-quarters of workers who opt for Social Security personal accounts under President Bush's "default" investment option are likely to earn less in benefits than those who stay with the traditional Social Security system, a prominent finance economist has concluded.

A new paper by Yale University economist Robert J. Shiller found that under Bush's default "life-cycle accounts," which shift assets from stocks to bonds over a worker's lifetime, nearly a third of workers would bring in less in benefits than if they remained in the traditional system. That analysis is based on historical rates of return in the United States. Using global rates of return, which Shiller says more closely track future conditions, life-cycle portfolios could be expected to fall short of the traditional system's returns 71 percent of the time.

No serious risk of losing money, huh? Of course, Thomas left himself an out because he can claim that he meant a negative return on investment, rather than lower benefits than those offered by traditional Social Security. But it's still deceptive as hell.

Comments

[anon]

For another view of Mr. Schiller's view, Donald Luskin has some comments here:

http://poorandstupid.com/2005_03_20_chronArchive.asp#111138827950153042

[tautala]

I think Shillers analysis is flawed. He compares an idea SS system with a real investment. Since SS relies on taxes and the tax base has a 1-to-1 connection to the economy, where does the SS tax come from that is different than a broad investment in that same economy?

He implies that the SS tax revenue will grow as needed but implies that the economy (or investment in the economy) won't.