[Superman]

I'm swamped, but here are my comments:

Craig is unrealistic. "Too bad for them" has little meaning. Perhaps those people will just die? Even if they (folks who are going to mismanage and lost their returement money) are beggars on the street corner, then there would be TONS of them and if they're not dying of starvation, then we'll be paying a cost to keep them alive. You cannot just say "too bad for them." It CAN'T work, even if we wanted it to, and Americans have always said "yes" when the question is "Are we going to take care of the unfortunate people in our society?" "Too bad for them" is as ignorant as "Nuke the Iraqis and Iranians and North Koreans and....."

Bill is right. This industry (retirement, insurance industries) are all about economies of scale, and are (ideally) best administered by an entity like a government agency. The larger the org, the smaller the administrative costs per account. Sure, everyone's disappointed with gubmint's performance here, but the problem has not been the administering agency. The problem is the guys you elected, and let them go unsupervised. Gubmint also does not collect a profit. Again, this is a perfect example of (even if you want people to 'handle' their own investment decisions) an industry that government is ideally suited to handle. Even if you toss your beer can at the screen, kiss your stock car #3 model, mispronounce some cuss words and insist that we have corporations take administrative costs and profits from our accounts, some gubmint agency is going to have to spend almost as much to regulate and watchdog those corporations as they would have spent just administering investors' decisions.

Krugman is probably right.

I'm short of time, and even if I were not, CATO stuff would be last on my reading list. I've reviewed their "research" a good number of times before. They write the conclusion first, and then go collect the data. If you like CATO, then you still don't know whether you like economics or not, since that's decidedly not what they do there.

Back to my observation. To a genius like Dubya, SS reform is as elegant as reneging on promised benefits. That, my friends, is "privatization." I wish he were just a plain 'ol idiot, instead of what he apparently actually is.