STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
Robert Novak reports an unlikely political union on an even more unlikely subject:
Rep. Jim DeMint, a conservative Republican running for the Senate in South Carolina, will this week introduce a Social Security reform bill permitting private investment by younger workers. That’s not unusual. What’s unusual is his intended co-sponsor: Rep. Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee, a rising Democrat superstar and Congressional Black Caucus member.
Quite interesting, although Novak infers from Ford’s failure to return his phone calls that Ford may be having second thoughts. Investment of part of Social Security in the stock market in some way makes sense to me, although it’ll be much harder to sell it to those who waited until too late to jump on the 1990s bubble and lost a lot of money. There’s not much question, though, that over a thirty or forty year work life, the stock market is a much more lucrative investment vehicle than treasury bonds.
