Get Your Blog Up

“This administration is populated by people who’ve spent their careers bashing government. They’re not just small-government conservatives—they’re Grover Norquist, strangle-it-in-the-bathtub conservatives. It’s a cognitive disconnect for them to be able to do something well in an arena that they have so derided and reviled all these years.”

Senator Hillary Clinton

Monday, April 18, 2005

The common man and Social Security

WaPo:
"I'm 1,000-percent convinced of this: The president cares the most about this $10-an-hour person," said Allan B. Hubbard, director of the White House National Economic Council. "And what he gets most irritated by is when it is suggested, 'Oh the $10-an-hour person isn't sophisticated enough to deal with a personal retirement account.' "

I imagine the $10-an-hour person may be sophisticated enough to have some understanding of a personal retirement account, but the minimum wage the last time I checked was $5.15-an-hour. Most of those people probably don't have the time or energy to figure out their personal retirement account as they drive to their second job or to pick up the kids from grandma's house.

I bet, though, if you gave everyone a minimum wage of $10-an-hour, they'd be less worried about their future.

The other thing of note in the article is that people seem to be getting a bit upset that Bush would rather talk to a handpicked partisan crowd than working Americans who actually are going to need Social Security when they retire. For a so called "common guy," he sure seems to do his darndest to stay away from them, doesn't he?