Thursday, January 27, 2005

Right-Wing Math

by Tom Bozzo

A couple of the big kids are already having a lot of well-deserved fun with calculators posted by right-wing think tanks to help push Social Security privatization private accounts personal accounts personalized accounts.

One thing that seems to have inexplicably escaped notice is that the Heritage Foundation's calculator allows the user to choose a mix of stock and bond investments. So while playing with the calculator, I set the investment allocation in my hypothetical personalized account to 100% U.S. Treasury bonds — the very same worthless IOUs that the Social Security trust fund already holds.

According to the Heritage calculator, the magic of personalization adds $5,112 per month to my retirement income, relative to plain old Social Security. Wow!

There are, needless to say, some other less bloggably amusing technical flaws in the Heritage calculator without even going into the realm of dubious assumptions. This will not do much to convince us highly educated liberals that we are not actually a little smarter than our conservative peers.*

* Just kidding!**

** Mostly.***

*** :-).
Comments:
Disagree with the GOP? Well Flag Flag Flag, 9/11, Freedom, Liberty, Freedom, 9/11, WMDs, Freedom, Terror!
 
Well, on this one they're trying the greed approach first, but if that doesn't work...
 
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