FACTCHECK THEIR ASSES

I got this email from Factcheck.org and I knew it was screwy, because I wrote about this before - the crazy idea that the Federal Thrift Savings Plan is comparable to what Bushco is proposing.

I don't know what it is with Factcheck. They have tunnel vision; they seem oblivious to context.

Basically, they're claiming there's no money to be made on privatized accounts because TSP accounts have such low administrative costs:

But Bush's proposed accounts differ substantially from the 19-year-old TSP. Moreover, they would be much more difficult to run than the TSP and have far higher administrative costs than the president and his supporters let on, some experts say.

"It's a non-starter," said Francis X. Cavanaugh, a designer of the TSP who from 1986 to 1994 was the first executive director of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, which administers the plan. "There's no way they can do this without an enormous federal subsidy. . . . This has to do with workability, no matter how one feels about it philosophically, and it's not workable."

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