If the president gave a speech in an empty airplane hanger, would it make any sound?
Yesterday, President Bush kicked off a new round of “barnstorming” his way around the country trying to sell his plan — strike that, his desire — to partially privatize Social Security. But the tour got off to an inauspicious start in an airplane hanger in Portsmouth, New Hampshire according to several local reports.
The Boston Herald files a brief dispatch, noting, “White House aides collected empty chairs in an echoing Pease International Tradeport hangar before Bush took the stage since only about half of the 2,000 free tickets were taken.”
Dover, New Hampshire’s Foster’s Online has an even gloomier account of the show, reporting that “About 500 people attended the event, which was considerably less than the crowd of about 2,000 that attended when Bush visited here in October just before his re-election.”
Ouch. Maybe all the president’s men need to spend a little more of that political capital promoting these events beforehand.
We have one quibble with these articles, but it’s not a small one. Both stories erroneously claim that the president wants to offer workers the chance to transfer up to 4 percent of their payroll taxes to individual investment accounts for retirees. But as we’ve said so many times before, it’s not 4 percent of payroll taxes, it’s 4 percent of the first $90,000 of an individual’s total salary, or 4 percentage points.
Take an individual who earns that $90,000. The way these reporters describe it, a mere $446 of that person’s annual payroll tax would be moved into a private account. In fact, the true figure would be $3,600.
C’mon, boys and girls We know the president’s plan is still largely unformed, but at least this much has been spelled out.
Repeatedly.
–Paul McLeary
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.