After years of pushing for Social Security privatization and deriding Al Gore's concept of a "lock box", it looks like Stephen Moore just embraced it whether he meant to or not after CNN's Ali Velshi pointed out that private accounts might not be looking too good to retirees right now. I think hell just froze over because Stephen Moore actually said something I agree with.
VELSHI: Stephen Moore lets go back to Social Security for a second. I think you and I will agree there is a problem with the way it runs now. Chrystia makes a good point if we have privatized Social Security you can invest in things that you choose, your Social Security account could look at bad as your 401k account after the economic crisis.
MOORE: Well remember we are talking about people investing not over two or three years, but people investing over a whole life time. You start paying Social Security when you are 19, 20, and 21 years old. Actually Chrystia it is interesting because some studies have been done, even with the big plunge in the stock market that happened in 2008 and 2009, workers still would have been substantially better off we would have had people with much bigger pensions if we had allowed them to put some of that money into the stock market rather than putting into Social Security.
But even if you are worried about not allowing people to put money in to the stock market because you think it is too risky, why not just let people put money into an account with Treasury bills, in other words just let them have a personally owned account so that Congress can't keep stealing the money from Social Security. One of the reasons why we have such a big deficit right now Ali as you know is that over the last 25 years Congress has stolen about $1 trillion of Social Security money and they spent it on other programs.
VELSHI: There may be some middle ground here and that it doesn't have to be private accounts. We can really create that lock box which is really actually locked. Richard Quest you have seen different systems around the world. The world is changing there are lots of countries use different ways of dealing with how they support people in their old age. We have seen in Europe some of the debt problems there are made worse by the fact that people gets lots money from the government no matter what.
That sounds a whole lot like Al Gore's "lock box" to me. I await the backtracking since he really does want the fund privatized and wants to hand it over to Wall Street. And even though he's saying that Congress should keep their hands off of that fund, which I agree with, you know he doesn't want to see taxes raised to pay back the funds they've already borrowed against.
