corrente

Today's WaPo coverage is interesting: "Private accounts" in the headline, "personal accounts" in the lede, then the second paragraph uses "private accounts" as a synonym for "personal accounts"... So confusing. If phasing out Social Security was really a good idea, you'd think they wouldn't have to keep coming up with new names for what they want to do:

Bush's Social Security Plan to Settle on Private Accounts
Bush's advisers have settled on a proposal for structuring the personal accounts they hope to create in Social Security, while on Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats were launching an effort to defeat the plan altogether.

Under a plan recommended to Bush, the private accounts would resemble many company-sponsored retirement plans, with just a handful of investment options.
(via WaPo)

Wow, just a handful, huh? I wonder if they're going to be Republican contributors?

And hey, all the brokers in this handful of plans are going to outperform Social Security, right? As didn't happen in Chile, right? Oh, wait, I thought the government wasn't supposed to pick winners... Must... block... out... cognitive... dissonance...

Under the emerging Bush plan for Social Security, the default investment would be a "life cycle" account. It would begin with investments that have greater potential for both risk and reward and shift to safer bonds as a worker ages, officials in and outside the administration said.

So for this, we pay these guys a commission? Why? But in terms of that all important framing:

"Life cycle," huh? Yep, it's dog food!




What'll it be, Grandma? Cycle Puppy, Cycle Adult, Cycle Lite or Cycle Senior?

And Alpo or Cycle, it's still dog food.

UPDATE Kevin Drum has a nice paranoid bait and switch theory.

UPDATE 2: On topic Corrente backtrack: The Pinochet Plan