It seems as though the Times has come down with Brit Hume disease and are bending quotes to fit their agenda.
In the looming battle over Social Security reform, the Democrats keep calling forth the ghost of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, they say, would be foursquare against President Bush's plan to let workers invest some of their payroll taxes in their own personal retirement accounts.
More below.
Washington Times Insider site
Democratic leaders say that FDR would be aghast and shocked, if not horrified, at what Mr. Bush has proposed. But someone looked up what FDR actually said about the future financing needs of Social Security. They discovered that the New Deal president predicted reforms that sound very much like Mr. Bush's plan.
In an address to a joint session of Congress on January 17, 1935, here's what FDR had to say: "For perhaps 30 years to come funds will have to be provided by the states and the federal government to meet these pensions."
After that, Social Security's financing door should be fully opened to "voluntary contributory annuities by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age," FDR said.
"It is proposed that the federal government assume one-half of the cost of the old-age pension plan, which ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans," FDR told Congress.
This is exactly what Mr. Bush is proposing: Voluntary contributions into private investment plans throughout your working life that can then be used to purchase, if you choose, a private income annuity that would at first supplement Social Security retirement benefits and perhaps someday supplant them altogether (though even Mr. Bush doesn't go this far -- yet).