Mike McGavick kinda sorta comes clean on supporting President Bush’s plan to phase out Social Security and replace it with private accounts!
David Postman of 
the Seattle Times interviewed McGavick this morning and, according to Postman, McGavick “wants a phased-in system of individually controlled, privately managed retirement accounts that could provide a higher yield than the government-run system, but would come with a lower guaranteed payment.”
Wipe away the poll-tested double talk and that sounds like, yes, McGavick does support the president’s plan. (He insists on the ‘it’s not privatization‘ word game bamboozlement, for example.)
So does he?
Says McGavick: “I do not think the president’s program was that well designed or that well promoted. But I think something like this with some hard bipartisan work could create a lasting solution for a problem that has cyclically dogged us for decades.”
We’ll come back to this issue because President Bush actually never committed to a specific plan. So I’m curious whether this is really a dodge or whether there’s some specific issue on which McGavick disagrees with the president’s plans.
For now, McGavick seems like he just wants the issue to go away. He told Postman that on Social Security he wants “to get this out of the political world and into a thoughtful space.”
For the moment, let’s put McGavick down as being for President Bush’s plan to phase out Social Security and replace it with private accounts, along with some as yet unspecified revisions to the Bush plan, and also for getting “into a thoughtful space.”
