[OESY]

Mr. Mankiw, a professor at Harvard, was recently chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, of which Mr. Swagel, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was chief of staff.

[SampleMan]

Just read this in my WSJ. Its beautiful and also true. The Dims should be rebuilding their party to the right, with a strong streak for healthy regulation, built not on the premise that free enterprise is bad, but on the premise that it occasionally abuses the little guy when unfair advantage is allowed.

The big problem with the Dims is that they get out the vote with hate, and thus business, Republicans, etc. are evil, and you can't compromise with evil.

With two major pro-capitalist parties, one pushing to free business, the other striving to ensure fair play, we would thrive.

[massadvj]

According to the AARP, the average (median) contributor to social security has a net worth of less than $50K. The average recipient of social security has a net worth of over $125K. And yet the Dimwit party, champion of the underclass, wants absolutely nothing to do with reform.

They lament the growing disparity between rich and poor in this country, and yet because of the high correlation between wealth and age, plus the fact that 2/3 of the federal budget is spent on age-based entitlements, the greatest contributor to that disparity is the federal government and its so-called "social spending".

In truth, Social Security and Medicare are not social spending. They merely guarantee that the already-wealthy have disposable income so that they will not have to dig into their vast reservoirs of wealth. The senior class is now the boujoir class in this country, with their golf course haciendas and ocean view condos. This is the natural consequence of socialism, and yet the socialists themselves refuse to see it for what it is.

Your average casino in Atlantic City does more to level the economic disparity between rich and poor in America than Social Security and Medicare put together.

Ironically, the Dims are digging in to support a program that benefits the rich, punishes the working class, and erects a significant imediment to the downtrodden having much-needed upward mobility. Remember when we were the ones referred to as the "stupid party"? How the tide has turned.

[yoe]

Remember that most Americans trust their 401k plan more than they trust Congress.

A truism if ever there were one! The President's plan gives the below 50s a choice, the same plan as all federal workers have and one that makes it much harder for the Congress to use/steal your money on wasteful and silly pork/projects.