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| Home Front: Politix |
| Bothering With Okrent, One More Time |
| 2005-01-06 |
| It's been months since I've wasted my time being lied to by New York Times "public editor" Dan Okrent. But today there was one I couldn't pass up. Here's my email to him today: I know we have stopped "corresponding," and that you claim such as a victory for your columnist corrections policy (imagine what a victory you could claim if you just stopped checking email altogether). But this one is so egregious I had to bother, though I'm sure it will go down the hole like all the others. In today's op-ed "Choose and Lose" by Barry Schwartz, the author states: What's more, the administrative costs of keeping track of these private accounts, according to President Bush's Commission to Strengthen Social Security, will be 10 to 30 times the cost of administering the current system, eating up almost all of the hypothetical gains that equity investments could provide. Here is the report of the Commission. On page 9 and again on page 97 it sets the administrative costs at 30 basis points, which means 3 tenths of one percent. This figure was agreed by the Commission and the Office of the Actuary of the Social Security Administration. Here is the statement of the Social Security Trust Fund from its Board of Trustees. You can see that administrative costs for the existing system are $4.6 billion on an asset base of $1530.8 billion, or 30 basis points. The costs are the same. They are not "10 to 30 times." Why the Times would have ever let a professor of psychology mouth off about the administrative costs of Social Security I have no idea. But I'm sure you and Gail Collins will come up with one. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #2 m-o-n-e-y |
| Posted by: Mrs. Davis 2005-01-06 2:48:33 PM |
| #1 Don Luskin's vicious, precisely why I like him. Too bad we don't know why he sued Atrios last year; any theories? |
| Posted by: Raj 2005-01-06 2:38:43 PM |