This is what we’re aiming for now?
Just when you thought Alan Greenspan had reached the pinnacle of uselessness:
U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan embraced President Bush’s vision of an “ownership society” on Thursday, saying private Social Security accounts could foster feelings of wealth among poor Americans. […]
While admitting private accounts would not solve the solvency problem facing the government retirement system, he said they would create “a sense of ownership.”
“These accounts, properly constructed and managed, will create … a sense of increased wealth on the part of middle and lower-income classes of this society, who have had to struggle with very little capital,” Greenspan told the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee. [Emphasis added, fuckstickery in the original.]
Private accounts will not solve the problem, but they are good because they will give poor Americans a sense of increased wealth and make them feel like they’re wealthy.
Alan! What have they done to you?
PRAY FOR ALAN.
Let us remember that Greenspan is Randroid – in that light, all of his often contridictory pronouncements make a sick kind of sense.
I simply cannot spell contradictory.
Oh, wait. I just did.
Does this have something to do with that book Think And Grow Rich?
(a) As Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, and others have documented, Greenspan in the early 1980’s successfully advocated raising Social Security rates so that we could build up a reserve and preserve Social Security even after the Baby Boomers retired. Greenspan’s newly-revealed desire to gut Social Security shows him to be a deceitful scumbag.
(b) Maybe if we undid some or all of the massive tax cuts for the rich in recent years, and thereby shifted a greater proportion of the tax burden back onto the rich, that would give middle class and poor folks “a sense of increased wealth.” If we raised the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7 or $8, that would obviously give people making minimum wage “a sense of increased wealth.” Of course, Greenspan doesn’t want to actually make the middle class and the poor wealthier. He just wants to make them feel (even if erroneously) that they are wealthier.
All we have to do to fix social security is get rid of the cap where you stop paying the tax after your salary reaches a certain point. Rich people aren’t paying their fare share of Social Security taxes.
Why not just tell every poor American that they are actually a long-lost heir to the Hilton fortune? That will make them happy until they discover it’s not true.
But since the poor are like goldfish, they’ll forget their disappointment in a few minutes and then the government can give them the same good news all over again!
Privatization Summed Up
Alan Greenspan chimes in on SS privatization.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan embraced President Bush’s vision of an “ownership society” on Thursday, saying private Social Security accounts could foster feelings…
Typical of the incompetent. They have nothing, as usual. No plans or programs beyond “kill things” and “Give the rich more money.” Pathetic is what these people are. Greenspan is a joke. Another freaking hand puppet for thieves.
Lack of integrity in the name of ideology is no vice!
LOLOL!
Greenspan wouldn’t have said such things unless he was afraid of losing his job in the whorehouse.
As an old man myself, I can say that he is senile, he should have quit serious work about 10 years ago, he is so far gone he doesn’t realise it.
Private accounts will not solve the problem, but they are good because they will give poor Americans a sense of increased wealth and make them feel like they’re wealthy.
Sooo . . . Private accounts are the economic equivalent of Absorb-SHUN?
rimshot . . .
foster feelings of wealth among poor Americans. […]
Which poor Americans. The ones who will be poor afer Dumbya’s reforms or the ones who are poor now?
Fostering feelings of wealth among poor Americans. Yes. That “feeling” after all is the real goal for this administration and their Wall Street buddies. The outcome reality might very well be very Dickensian – debtors prisons and poor houses where the elderly and poor will be denied money and medical aid and will be buried in mass graves.
Hell, I know people who get that “feeling” that Greenspan and Dubya think the “poor” should aspire to everytime they spend a dollar on the lottery.
Dickensian, indeed. From Little Dorrit: Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving HOW NOT TO DO IT.
We are watching the American Circumlocution Office at its peak.
pray that andrea mitchell denies him sex and makes him sleep on the couch unless he takes back his words.
http://democrats.senate.gov/ss/calc.html
Go play with that for a bit. It’s probably not entirely accurate but it paints a picture that everyone loses in the end. But as usual it would seem that the poor lose more than the rich given a comparison of real spendable income. Whoda thunk it?
Yeah, yeah, I’m two days late on this, but anyway: How exactly is it that “the poor” are supposed to invest in the stock market? They’re certainly not doing it now. People who make 12,000 bucks a year don’t exactly have a grand or so left over to save. This whole concept is so stupid on its face I can’t believe people aren’t laughing until they drool over it, much less having serious discussions about how it would work.
Greenspan is a dickless fuckwit, BTW.