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Conservatives Splitting on Social Security Some Opinion Leaders Unconvinced on Bush Proposal for Personal Accounts By Jonathan Weisman Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, March 29, 2005; Page E03
President Bush's proposal to add private investment accounts to Social Security is beginning to create controversy within the one group that has most forcefully embraced the idea in theory: the conservative intelligentsia.
Under Bush's approach, personal accounts "are complicated," wrote Alex J. Pollock, a finance expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, in a paper he will present at AEI today. "To many people, they are downright confusing and even frightening, and they require diverting a portion of payroll taxes away from the U.S. Treasury."
Conservative Harvard University economist Robert J. Barro broke with the White House in the April 4 issue of Business Week, writing, "Overall the accounts are a bad idea." Tyler Cowen, a free-market economist at George Mason University, has linked his Web log, Marginal Revolution, to Barro's dissent, declaring, "Robert Barro agrees with me on Social Security."
To be sure, the White House can tap a deep well of support among conservative academics. Harvard economist Martin Feldstein has spoken glowingly of private accounts, as have Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker and Richard A. Posner, both of the University of Chicago.
But Cowen and others say the cracks in public support for the president's approach are only the surface manifestations of wider misgivings on the right. <snip>
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