David Adesnik (OxBlog) says in comments below that I misrepresented his position by compiling only one side of his criticisms, some of which were directed at George Bush. I'm willing to admit that maybe I did misrepresent his position, because I'm not really sure what it is.

Here's what I think he thinks, based on this post and this one:

• Social Security is a problem, but it is not a crisis.


• Social Security creates a moral hazard problem that leads to reduced private savings, but that's okay because it more or less works and is popular.


• Private accounts are good, but only if they're simple and allow choice. Laura Tyson's Social Security plus plan is no good.


• The transition cost of replacing the current SS system with private accounts doesn't seem worth it.


• I don't know much about the UK retirement system, but Margaret Thatcher is good and markets are good so it must be good.


• George Bush is good and brave because he does unpopular things, and he should use an obscure quote from FDR to sell his vaguely defined plan that Democrats oppose.

He can correct me if I'm wrong.

Stepping back a bit from my food fight, it seems to me that one point ought to be made clear: either you believe that Social Security ought to be a defined benefit plan, or you don't.

Josh Marshall does a good job in talking about this here. Switching Social Security to a defined contribution plan, as Bush wants to do, means you are offloading the risk that is now shared by all Americans onto individuals. Now some people don't like the idea of pooling risk this way, because they think it makes people less self-reliant and more dependent on government. But as Elizabeth Anderson says, it's not clear why the government ought to be singled out for special opprobrium here. The only real difference between social insurance and private insurance is that the federal government offers a bigger pool.

It's not at all clear that the Bush plan will offer any sort of meaningful choice, so what's the point? If you want to fix the long-run imbalance in the system by cutting benefits, just cut benefits and announce that you're doing so. If you want to diversify the trust fund, assuming it exists, fine. If you want to raise taxes, fine.

But the Bush administration is engaging in some kind of serious flim-flammery here in selling what is really a combined benefit cut and phase out of Social Security as social insurance as a solution to the fiscal problem, which it only sometimes admits is not really the point of all this anyway.

That's not brave at all; it's dishonest.

Oh, and then there's the magic arbitrage part, which young Matthew addresses here, that seems to be partly resurrected from the Lindsey plan (though I could be wrong here). It's worth noting that the federal government won't be able to borrow at 3% forever.

It's as if this thing was devised by Milo Minderbender.

One thing I want to stress is that Americans are already absorbing more risk--and have been for some time. Another Yalie, Jacob Hacker, has done a lot of work on this and wrote about his findings in TNR here. Hacker says that the reason so many Americans don't feel great about the U.S. economy today is that they are more exposed to large swings in income, from which they are less protected than in the past. Freedom from worrying about whether you might be desperately poor in old age is a kind of freedom, too.

Maybe that's why folks aren't exactly jumping up and down in favor of phase-out, eh? Maybe that's why the President continues to misrepresent Social Security, his plan, etc. Kind of like Iraq. Which I suppose is a roundabout way of saying that maybe David was right after all.