no bait and switch, Greg. I'm telling you that it doesn't matter how much less than $1,000 per month I pay in SS or for my mortgage -- the exact figures don't change the fact that I have made all along -- that I pay more in SS. On the slim chance that you would believe me if I gave the exact numbers, I'll have to take a pass.

And I'm not sensitive about the use of "bullshit". I just don't care for the rudeness.

Don,

It sounds very much to me as though the attempt, wise or un, is to set up SS as most people currently think it is set up -- in accounts that (as many thought SS was) were out of bounds to the federal government (for general fund usage).

If there is something that sounds not-worth-it to me about the idea it is that, again, in typical Bush compromise thinking, he is actually layering even more federal beaurocracy on us -- yet another gov't agency. That's not "conservative".

But dismissing everything because "there is no crisis" is short-sighted (and a bit dishonest by those who now are ignoring that even Clinton et al were saying the same thing less than 10 years ago)

That's why I have offered, as first solution, that we need to rectify the inequity in contribution -- we need to accept SS for what it is -- an entitlement that all benefit from -- and as such, all should be paying for.

...and quit this talk about "running out of money" from one side, and "Social Security Trust Fund" from the other. It cannont EVER be a separate fund anymore -- not with books that balance. There too few people paying in the way the system is currently set up.   And it's not ever going to run out of money unless the government needs to default on all its debt.

So many are under the illusion that SS already is private accounts -- and that's why they are easily swayed by the promise of better (not able to be stolen by the fed gov't) accounts.