Columnists are paid to have opinions. Sometimes those opinions are wrong. Those two sentences are as obvious as a sunrise, but usually unspoken by my fellow opinionmongers. I can point you to many weeks of prescience and sheer genius in my work since I arrived at TIME in January 2003. But I think we'd learn more if we took a look at one of my goofs: I supported George W. Bush's idea of partially privatizing Social Security, which he tried to enact after he was re-elected in 2004. This was a close call for me at the time; it seems positively idiotic now that we've experienced the Great Recession — and the idea of private investment has finally regained proper perspective. Investment is about risk; Social Security is about certainty. A fair amount of certainty is crucial when it comes to retirement. Why, you might ask, was I blind to this simple proposition at the time?
Well, two reasons. The first was a matter of courtesy and optimism: I always try to give a newly elected President the benefit of the doubt. This is especially difficult — and all the more necessary — when it's a re-elected President whose policies seem misguided. I had written column after column about the bloody futility of Bush's war in Iraq — and don't get me started about the demonstrably foolish supply-side philosophy that spawned his tax cuts. Still, he was going to be my President for the next four years; my fellow citizens, and many of my readers, had voted him in. The partial privatization of Social Security was, he said, the top domestic priority for his second term. This seemed bold and politically risky. Scaring the elderly about cuts in their retirement benefits is one of the oldest tricks in the book, but Bush truly believed that if people could invest retirement savings in the market, they would end up with larger pensions.
And so did I, albeit with a truckload of caveats. I came to this belief the hard way, by overreading 30 years of experience as a journalist. Much of that time had been spent on urban issues, especially the failure of traditional liberal social programs to alleviate poverty. Indeed, welfare — Aid to Families with Dependent Children — as it was then constituted seemed a system of perverse rewards that intensified poverty, encouraging poor women not to marry, not to work, not to make sure their kids showed up at school and so forth. Their children were making and having babies prematurely, with no sense of responsibility. A discrete culture of poverty — in which people didn't look for work even when the economy surged — had taken hold. An essential feature of this culture, it seemed to me, was passivity.
Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,2032304,00.html #ixzz16QdNwAKD
I find Klein somewhat of a joke as a columnist & pundit.
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