I guess that's the last time Bill Thomas goes on Meet the Press ... this was in my inbox today (below the jump):

{UPDATE 1-25-04} by nadezhda: Also after the jump, my response to what was a perfectly civil and innocuous query from praktike. Just in case anyone was losing sleep over what I think about Social Security and how it fits more broadly into "what should be done" in the economic and social policy arena, you can learn everything you ever wanted to know and were afraid to ask.    more »

MoJo wunderkind Brad Plumer wants to know why the Chicken Little Republicans have invented a crisis about a program that is healthy and successful. Is it solely in order to force American taxpayers to assume more risk?

Meanwhile, Brad's competitor Sam Rosenfeld over at the archrival TAPPED watched Bush's rare press conference today:

The president got a tad petulant when fielding questions on Social Security. His emphatic response to any and all queries about his position on the subject was an indignant, righteous refusal to answer: “You’re not going to get me to negotiate with myself,” he repeatedly told the perplexed reporters. “I know what you’re trying to get me to do. You’re trying to get me to answer ‘Why this,’ ‘why that,’ to take positions -- don’t bother to ask me.” Rather than merely dodge the questions, Bush seemed intent on staking out an explicit, principled position in favor of dodging the question.

Like I said before, if Bush is too chicken to define his position, the Democrats should define it for him.

UPDATE: Here's the transcript:   more »

Courtesy the Washington Post, another installment in the saga of the shift in the balance of economic risk away from capital and toward labor. This time brought to us by the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation.

A significant portion of the skyrocketing deficits is due to declared or likely-to-be bankruptcies in the airlines and steel industries. Deregulation of airlines may have expanded services and reduced the price of flying for us as consumers, but it looks like we may be picking up some of the tab as taxpayers.

Oh, and perhaps we should consider this little item when we're figuring out how to fund the transition cost of privatizing part of Social Security. Although it must be admitted, $20+ billion is easy to overlook when you're talking in fractions of a trillion.

Struggling under a cascade of bankruptcy filings in the airline and steel industries, the government's pension insurance agency said yesterday that its deficit has more than doubled in the past year -- to $23.3 billion.

The figure is so large that an overhaul of the way traditional pensions are funded and insured has become essential, several experts said. Pensions of about 44 million workers and retirees are insured by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.
[...]
"The bottom line seems to be that there really is a PBGC crisis, though to date neither Congress nor the [Bush] administration has been treating it as such," said Dallas L. Salisbury, who heads the Employer Benefit Research Institute in the District.

There are three basic ways that the deficit can be made up: (1) revaluation of assets through a bull market (combined with some "aggressive" portfolio management); (2) increasing revenues through larger premium payments from employers; and (3) taxpayers making up the difference.

Door Number 1 isn't what you'd want to bet the farm on, as hopefully someone learned in 2000.   more »