Some RWOpinion Leaders Unconvinced on Bush Proposal for Personal Accounts

Conservatives Splitting on Social Security
Some Opinion Leaders Unconvinced on Bush Proposal for Personal Accounts
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 29, 2005; Page E03


President Bush's proposal to add private investment accounts to Social Security is beginning to create controversy within the one group that has most forcefully embraced the idea in theory: the conservative intelligentsia.

Under Bush's approach, personal accounts "are complicated," wrote Alex J. Pollock, a finance expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, in a paper he will present at AEI today. "To many people, they are downright confusing and even frightening, and they require diverting a portion of payroll taxes away from the U.S. Treasury."

Conservative Harvard University economist Robert J. Barro broke with the White House in the April 4 issue of Business Week, writing, "Overall the accounts are a bad idea." Tyler Cowen, a free-market economist at George Mason University, has linked his Web log, Marginal Revolution, to Barro's dissent, declaring, "Robert Barro agrees with me on Social Security."

To be sure, the White House can tap a deep well of support among conservative academics. Harvard economist Martin Feldstein has spoken glowingly of private accounts, as have Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker and Richard A. Posner, both of the University of Chicago.

But Cowen and others say the cracks in public support for the president's approach are only the surface manifestations of wider misgivings on the right. <snip>

they're just holding out for more payola.

the holdouts for privatization. Feldstein has been waiting a LONG time for privatization to be taken seriously, and not waiting patiently.

Twenty-five years ago, he was accused of submitting falsified empirical results to support the notion that Social Security hurt national savings. When other researchers could not replicate his results, he famously blamed "computer error"! See Karen W. Arenson, "Martin Feldstein's Computer Error," New York Times (October 5, 1980, Section III), p. 19.