New Terminology

There's an ongoing Orwellian effort to use the phrase "personal accounts" to describe the administration's desired changes to Social Security.

Despite their own use of "private accounts" and "privatization" as recently as three weeks ago, the new White House line is to use "personal", not "private." (Apparently, Republican message-framer Frank Luntz found that "personal" tested better than "private" in focus groups.) Now the supporters of the changes accuse anyone who uses "private" of betraying their bias against the proposal. (Yes, even though they themselves used "private" for years, up until a few weeks ago. I said Orwellian, didn't I?)

If you keep your eyes peeled, you can watch this subtle usage shift spread through the news media, and get an insight into the so-called objectivity of the press. For a excellent snarky column on this topic, see Charles Pierce in the American Prospect. Personally, if we're going to fight this issue through capturing the terminology, I'm for Pierce's suggestion that we call them "Let Granny Eat Grass" accounts.

On a more serious note, don't miss this New York Times article on Chile's privatization, which W. himself has pointed to as an example. Particularly informative is that leaving the government system for private accounts was optional, yielding an experiment with a control group (and leading to yet another interesting piece of terminology.)

This leaves many Chileans in a situation that has led to the coining of a phrase: "pension damage." There is now even an Association of People With Pension Damage, 157,000 members and growing, that consists of Chileans, mostly former government employees, who find that their pensions, based on contributions to the private system, are significantly less than if they had remained in the old system.

"They come to us in desperation," said Yasmir Fariña, the group's president, "because those who stayed in the government system are often retiring with monthly pensions twice as large as everyone else's."