Little Lockboxes

Chuck Blahous, the White House's Social Security expert, took questions on the White House Web site yesterday. He didn't explicitly address whether the trust fund was worthless. But he did suggest a new link between the government's spending of the trust fund surplus and personal accounts:

"The President believes that surplus Social Security money should not be spent, which is one reason why he has proposed creating a system of personal accounts," Blahous wrote. "These personal accounts would save Social Security money, protecting it in the accounts of individual workers, where the government could not take it away."

Think of it as millions of little lock-boxes.

("Promises, Promises" by Daniel Froomkin)

[It's late at night in a kitchen in suburbia. The light comes on revealing George W. Bush in an Uncle Sam costume with his hands in a cookie jar. The American People, in the form of a sleepy 6-year-old, walks in to get a glass of water]

GW: What are you doing still up?

AP: I'm thirsty. (beat) Why preznit got hand in cookie jar?

GW: I've got some bad news, kid. Hate to break it to you, but your cookies are gone. Somebody must have took them.

AP: But Uncle Alan said if I put my cookies in the jar I can eat them tomorrow.

GW: But if you leave your cookies right out in the open for anybody to take, you can't still expect them to be there when you want to eat them. It's like they never existed.

AP: I want my cookies!

GW: Hush! Go back to bed and don't fuss. Tell you what, tomorrow I'll give you a brand-new teeny tiny cookie jar of your very own that noone else is supposed to touch, OK? You can even have your name on it.

Financial documents? In a FILING CABINET? The hell you say!