President Bush in Galveston County today, where workers voted to privatize their retirement accounts in 1981:

Just — let me just give you a sense for the difference between what a worker gets here in Galveston and then a worker would get out of Social Security. If you get a 3.75 percent return, like they guarantee here in Galveston, on your money, and you’re a person working 37 years, making about $25,000 a year, you’d receive $1,250 a month from the alternate plan now available for workers here — as opposed to $669 from Social Security. Think about that. That’s a difference between a better rate of return on your money over a 37-year period.

In fact, the Social Security Administration did an analysis of the Galveston plan in 1999. The report showed well-paid workers with no kids did slightly better in the short run under the plan. As for everyone else:

Social Security tends to offer higher initial benefits than the Galveston Plan to workers with lower earnings and/or families with dependents who qualify for Social Security benefits. Although many of Galveston’s initial benefits are higher than Social Security’s, they are not indexed to inflation and lose value relative to Social Security’s over time.

The same year, the Government Accountability Office compared the two plans, coming to a similar conclusion:

In general, low-wage workers and, to a lesser extent, median-wage workers would fare better under Social Security. High-wage earners can generally expect to do better under the Alternate Plans, although if spousal benefits are included, even the high-wage workers could eventually receive higher benefits from Social Security.

Hmmmm, makes you wonder which report President Bush was quoting.

From today’s Social Security event in Galveston, Texas:

MR. BENTLEY: And we’re operating in central Iraq. I’ll be back there next week.

[Snip]

THE PRESIDENT: How many children you got?

MR. BENTLEY: We have two children. We have a four-year-old son named Patrick, and a three-month-old daughter named Elaine that I just got to meet for the first time.

THE PRESIDENT: Really?

MR. BENTLEY: Yes, sir.

THE PRESIDENT: No wonder you’re emotional. (Laughter.) That’s awesome.

MRS. BENTLEY: She was born two days after he deployed.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, great.

Is this what it means to be a compassionate conservative?

Someone needs to tell the White House — just repeating the same talking point doesn’t make it true.

Scott McClellan this morning, spinning on Air Force One:

What has happened in this Senate is unprecedented. There has not been a situation like this, where members of one party have blocked nominees from even receiving an up or down vote on the floor.

The truth, courtesy of People for the American Way:

[M]ore than 50 Clinton nominees were not even granted a hearing by the GOP-led Judiciary Committee. Six more who had hearings were not given the courtesy of a committee vote. In fact, 35 percent of Clinton’s appeals court nominees were blocked without a vote while the GOP controlled the Senate from 1995 to 2000.

It’s not just the polls that show that Washington conservatives have overplayed their hands by pushing such a radical agenda. Right-wing overreach can also be seen in their numerous reversals in recent days, which aren’t getting as much attention as they should:

REVERSAL ON SCHIAVO INQUIRIES: Congressional conservatives “say they haven’t opened and don’t plan any new investigations of federal judges after Terri Schiavo’s death despite Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s promise to examine the judiciary’s conduct.”

REVERSAL ON PERSONAL ACCOUNTS: “On the eve of the first congressional hearing on the restructuring of Social Security, [conservatives] on the Senate Finance Committee signaled that they will not insist that personal accounts be part of the legislation and that they will not seek further details from President Bush about his plans for the government-run retirement program.”

REVERSAL ON ETHICS RULES: Congressional aides “said yesterday for the first time that they believe they will have to reverse or modify the ethics rules that were passed on a party-line vote in January.” Those rules have deadlocked the Ethics Committee by allowing members of one party to unilaterally block any ethics investigation.

REVERSAL ON BOLTON: “In contrast to optimistic statements from the White House, [Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA)] said Sunday that John R. Bolton’s prospects of winning Senate confirmation as ambassador to the United Nations were ‘too close to call.’ … Four of 10 Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have expressed concern about Mr. Bolton, on a panel where one Republican vote against him could keep the nomination from reaching the Senate floor.”

The Senate Finance Committee is conducting major hearings this morning on Social Security reform. ThinkProgress will be providing live updates throughout. You can watch the hearings live at CSPAN.org, or read more about them here.

Will private accounts blunt the pain of benefit cuts?

“It’s like trying to get your kid to eat spinach by offering a turnip for dessert.” — Peter Orszag, 4/26/05

The Senate Finance Committee is conducting major hearings this morning on Social Security reform. ThinkProgress will be providing live updates throughout. You can watch the hearings live at CSPAN.org, or read more about them here.

Peter Ferrara, 4/26/05:

The chief actuary of Social Security has scored this [the Ferrara plan] as achieving full and permanent solvency.

Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 12/22/03:

The claimed “seal of approval” that the actuaries are said to have placed on the plan turns out to be nothing more than a finding on the part of the actuaries that given all of the specifications Mr. Ferrara directed them to use — including the specification of extremely large general revenue transfers [$68 trillion] — the plan would restore long-term Social Security solvency. This should not be regarded as a breakthrough or a notable accomplishment. Virtually any plan that assumes general revenue transfers equal to nearly twice the Social Security shortfall should be able, on paper, to restore long-term solvency to the program. In other words, the Ferrara plan achieves its goals through an enormous “magic asterisk.”

The Senate Finance Committee is conducting major hearings this morning on Social Security reform. ThinkProgress will be providing live updates throughout. You can watch the hearings live at CSPAN.org, or read more about them here.

Senator Grassley, 4/26:

Each of the proposals we will be discussing today achieves the goal of sustainable solvency.

Not quite. Let’s review —

Pozen plan: Would only eliminate half of the long-term Social Security shortfall through massive benefit cuts for the middle class.

Ferrara plan: Transfers $68 trillion over 75 years from general revenues. Since the government is already running a deficit, this money would have to be borrowed.

Tanner plan: Achieves solvency only by completely dismantling the retirement portion of Social Security.

On the same day as “Justice Sunday,” one of the centerpieces of the fight over President Bush’s judicial nominees, Janice Rogers Brown, spoke on the “faith” war in the United States. In her talk, Judge Brown claimed that “people of faith were embroiled in a ‘war’ against secular humanists who threatened to divorce America from its religious roots.” Though her office will not make the text available, a news agency present was able to get some excerpts from her speech:

“There seems to have been no time since the Civil War that this country was so bitterly divided. It’s not a shooting war, but it is a war.”

“These are perilous times for people of faith. Not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud.”

America has moved away from the religious traditions on which it was founded. “When we move away from that, we change our whole conception of the most significant idea that America has to offer, which is this idea of human freedom and this notion of liberty.”

Atheism “handed human destiny over to the great god, autonomy, and this is quite a different idea of freedom…Freedom then becomes willfulness.”