An ad Homonym attack on Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias is a genius, a national treasure and a guy who can't avoid typos which are homonyms. When I was six I decided that English spellling was sily so I wouldn't lern it. Sad to say I ran into spell checkers which screen out all errors which are not homonyms.

Yglesias argues that this is his problem. He claims that he learned to write after spell checkers and before grammer checkers (I personally am still writing before grammer checkers because they get on my nerves). Also he notes that his blog does not have an editor.

However American Prospect Online should have an editor and that editor (if any) missed this boo-boo in Yglesias' absolutely brilliant demolition of social security privatisation (sorry personalisation) and the Cato institute.

"The debt, however, won't ever go away unless some huge some of money is found elsewhere"

Oh a bit of substance. Yglesias' though experiment cheats a little in a way similar to the Bush administration's cheats (boy that was harsh). He considers partial privatization based on a simple opt out. The Bush non plan clearly involves a 3% (real) offset. That is, in exchange for paying one third less in payroll taxes to the SSA one gets a two thirds reduction of the guaranteed benefit. That extra third penalty is the huge sum of money to be found in the pockets of suckers who, demographers say, are born every minute.

The reason that this is just slightly cheating is that much of the 3%-2% = sucker tax will go to financial services corporations not the SSA.