Sunday, February 06, 2005

HR and FDR

An article of faith in wingnuttia this week, prompting lots of emails, was that both FDR and Harry Reid were proponents of private accounts, based on a misreading of their comments. I've already discussed the Reid comments, and Media Matters takes on the FDR issue (they also address the Reid issue here).

The Media Matters item even understates the objection to that interpretation of FDR's quote. FDR was pushing, in addition to Social Security, a voluntary annuity program. A voluntary annuity program is risk free (except, depending on the annuity, the risk of not living long enough to collect). This has nothing to do with investing your money in the market or even a market fund.

Looking forward to next week when a whole new round of misrepresented out of context quotes sent down from wingnut central magically come out of Brit Hume's mouth.

Let's talk about blogger ethics some more.