The "Reckonings" column on the op-ed page of today's New York Times makes the following argument against partially privatizing Social Security: "Managing millions of small individual accounts would be very expensive. That last point is important. A forthcoming study by the Congressional Budget Office suggests that as much as 30 percent of the value of private accounts would end up consumed by administrative costs. This compares with costs that are less than 1 percent of benefits in today's Social Security system."
If the government is going to spend 30 percent of the value of private accounts on administrative costs, that's one of the best arguments yet for a full privatization. After all, in the private sector, costs are much lower. The Web site of Vanguard mutual funds reports that "A low-cost index fund might have an expense ratio of 0.3% (or $3 per $1,000 invested). In comparison, the average annual expense ratio of general equity funds is 1.45%, according to Lipper Inc." If the private sector can do this job for 1.45 percent or 0.3 percent, why would it cost the government 30 percent? And if it would really cost the government 30 percent, why let the government do the job instead of handing it over completely to the private sector? The "Reckonings" columnist doesn't ask or answer these questions, instead treating the "30 percent" claim as an argument for preserving the essentials of the current Social Security system.
Anti-Immigrant: The front page of today's New York Times carries an above-the-fold dispatch from Imperial Beach, Calif., that traffics in the worst kind of anti-immigrant stereotypes. The Times passes along unchallenged the claim that "hordes" of immigrants are to blame for "loss of business, destruction of private property and environmental degradation." It quotes one man who claimed immigrants (the Times calls them "trespassers") "had stolen four of his cars, crouched down in his bushes and once hid in a room of his house." To read the Times article, you'd never know that native-born Americans steal cars, destroy private property, and degrade the environment, too. You'd never know that lots of immigrants come to America and obey the laws of the country. The Times article, while fawning all over the supposed successes of the border-enforcement effort known as Operation Gatekeeper, never tells readers how much the operation costs. The operation's features include a Buchananite 47-mile border fence and a doubling of the number of Border Patrol agents, to 2,000, the Times reports. No one in the Times article voices the obvious policy alternative -- rather than building fences to keep immigrants out and enforce restrictive immigration laws, why not welcome more immigrants into America to help build the country? Why should the immigrants who happened to get to America a few decades or centuries ago have the right to slam the door on those who want to join them?
Accused: An Associated Press item picked up as a brief in the New York Times metro section today reports that the Rev. Al Sharpton "accused the Democratic Party of moving to the right." So troubling, apparently, is a move to the right that the press treats it as an accusation rather than a description.
Undercooked: An editorial in today's New York Times about Joseph Ellis reports that his books "are those rare creatures, best-selling works of history." So rare that history books occupied four of the top eight spots on Sunday's New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list.