Paul Ryan: The secret tape

Forget that video of Mitt peeing on the peons. The hot new transcript is Paul Ryan talking to his fellow Randroids about the pressing need to transform Social Security and Medicare into profit-making ventures.

-- Ryan describes Social Security and Medicare as “collectivist” and “socialistic.”

-- Ryan’s strategic plan:  privatize Social Security and Medicare in order to convert people from “collectivism” to believers in a “capitalistic individualistic” philosophy.  So that there will be “more people on our team” who “won’t listen to” Democrats.

-- Ryan’s acceptance of Pinochet’s Secretary of Social Security José Piñera’s similar program of Social Security privatization as a “moral revolution” that made Marxists into capitalists who started to read the Chilean equivalent of the Wall Street Journal.  Ryan is overheard, “Yeah”  “That’s right.”

Author Vincent Miller invites us to look to the actual remarks, not just at his bullet points. (If you hit the link, you'll be able to do just that.) Basically, Ryan wants the stock market wheeler-dealers to do with your Social Security money what they did to all of those 401ks.

For more background on Piñera, see here. As you read this, keep in mind that this is the failed, grossly expensive system that Ryan wants to impose on the U.S. (emphases added throughout):

The transition was expensive and funded by slashing government programs, selling off state-owned industries, selling bonds to the new pension funds, and raising taxes. Privatization costs, which also included a government subsidy for workers unable to accumulate enough in their private accounts to guarantee a minimum income in retirement, averaged more than 6 percent of Chile's gross domestic product in the 1980s and are expected to average more than 4 percent of GDP each year until 2037.

But while the reform's supporters argue it has been a major success story, officials both inside and outside Chile now increasingly question whether the high costs and modest investment returns have doomed Piñera's original promise: a decent retirement income for workers at a savings for the government. Last year, the World Bank, which until recently encouraged countries to privatize pensions, published a highly skeptical report on private retirement systems in Latin America; Truman Packard, one of the report's authors, says the bank has told the Chilean government that it must spend more to subsidize the private system and "increase its role in preventing old-age poverty."

The bank found that exorbitant fees and other costs charged by private pension fund managers eat up as much as 15 percent of the contributions made by average Chilean workers, and even more for poorer workers. Investment returns have been far more modest than the hefty 11 percent return claimed by the private managers. The Chilean government's pension superintendent says actual returns for someone earning Chile's minimum wage were only 3.7 percent between 1994 and 2000.

A recent report by the Chilean government brought more grim news, forecasting that as many as half of all workers won't be able to save enough to receive the minimum pension when they retire—even after paying into their accounts for 30 years—and will therefore rely on government subsidies. More than 17 percent of Chile's retirees now continue working because they can't afford to live on their pensions, according to that study, and another 7 percent want to work, but can't find jobs.

A system that fails half of the population, says economist Dean Baker, codirector of the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, can't claim to have succeeded: "It hasn't provided security to people." Piñera himself didn't respond to numerous requests to comment on the dismal statistics. But his economics mentor Harberger shrugs at the data. "That [Chileans] weren't able to save enough money," he says, "is one of those things."

That's Paul Ryan's financial hero, folks: The guy who robbed the Chilean economy at the behest of one of the world's filthiest fascists.

The followers of Ayn Rand are insane. They will never admit that their schemes have failed. They will never allow empirical data to trump ideology. They are supremely lacking in reason.