Any transcripts from Hillary Clinton's on-line "conversation" tonight? (I have an excerpt...)

I caught only the tail end of Hillary's chat session today, but here is part of her response to a woman's concerns about retirement and Social Security:

...and I will do everything I can do make sure it's protected and that it will be available to you and to others. But we've got to come up with some new ways of helping you save for retirement and making sure that you're not gonna be left hanging either by your employer or by your government through Social Security. So I'm looking at some ideas about how to help you and other people who are hard-working like you make investments in accounts that will be safe and will be on top of Social Security that will be there when you need it, when you're ready for retirement. This is a huge issue, because pension security, retirement security is something that is really part of the basic bargain that I believe we should have between our government and our people, and it's something I'm gonna be focused on during this campaign.

I have been ruthlessly 'ignoring' '08 candidate threads, but I am curious about what she said.

Traffic was abominable on the way home today, so I could only catch that much at the end.

Wall Street and the mega banks are salivating to get their hands on hundreds of thousands of individual retirement/savings accounts because they can charge fees to every single one of those accounts everytime they shuffle your money around from one investment to another. And the necessary fiscal discipline - if the intent really is to force people to actually save for retirement, and not for the next unforseeable economic emergency in their lives, is to put a big barrier between you and your money until you actually retire. That would be in the form of a very punitive penalty for early withdrawal. Yes, people should try to save extra money for retirement. But the social security system can be EASILY made secure by putting it in a lockbox and removing the limits on income from which SS contributions are withheld. Senator Clinton's plan would generate a ton of donations from Wall Street to her campaign - that is for sure. You know bush wasn't pushing the privatization of social security (or anything else) out of his concern for the common man. There was always a load of profit to be made.

over other creditors in bankruptcy, to require that any entity handling pension funds has a fiduciary duty to the potential pension recipients in handling the pension money and to require that the government ensure money put into pension funds of any kind.

That sounds like simply allowing individuals to set up their own pension funds - but there still will be investment risks. Even if pension creditors are given precedence in bankruptcy proceedings, that is no guarantee as to what percentage of their pensions will be available at the end of the bankruptcy proceedings. And there will be administrative fees charged on every individual fund, unless the government has complete control of administrating the funds. And to me that then sounds like a subset of the social security program.

She talked about health care. she explained that yes, she did try this once before, and has the scars to prove it, but she learned a lot from that experience, and there's also a big difference now. Everyone is talking about the cost of health care. Employers, hospitals, the young, old, and in between. She made a lot of generalizations, but did make 2 specific suggestions. Enable people to buy into Medicare, or enable them to buy into the Fed. plan that she has.

She was asked how she planned to protect America from terrorists. control the boarders, ports, and air freight, and the biggest of all, re-establish afriendship and cooperation with other countries around the world. The last six years, this administration has ignored all the criends we had, and we cannot do it without them, nor can they without us.

She talked about Americas dependance on foreign oil, and made several suggestions:

Demand vehicles be mademore fuel efficient.

Remove the oil subsidies, and add a windfall tax on oil companies.

Use the money from the tax and former subsidies to encourage research into alternative energy sources, such as solar, geothermal, wind, etc.

Put this plan on the fast track.

She said it was a mistake for Shrub to pull out of the Kyoto agreement, but the biggest mistake was that he didn't offer any alternative. You can't just pretend that global warming is just not happening!

She was asked about what can be done to help students afford to go to college. I didn't catchthe wholething, but she mentioned that she believed aide should be based on need instead of merit as it's done now. There are not only A students who need financial help, but B, and C stidents who are working hard.

The last topic was SS, and that's where you cam in.

There will be another web conversation tomorrow night at 7PM est.

she wants people to be able to buy into Medicare. Excellent idea.

If you broaden the pool with younger people, and expand the income source with younger people participating and probably NOT needing as much care as the elderly, there will be more money in the pool. Those unhappy with the Madicare option could have the option of buying into the Federal Health Care Program at a higher cost.

I'm thinking about what question I could send for tomorrow's stream.

"If you like social security, I like it too. If you don't like it, neither do I. I like what you like."

That is why Hillary is going to be the 08 nominee.:yoiks: