Stromata Blog

The Blago-Burris Seat

Notwithstanding the ingenious suggestions of various Volokh Conspiracy commenters, there are only two ways that the Senate can avoid seating Roland Burris. One is to persuade the Supreme Court to overrule Powell v. McCormack. That could happen, but liberals won’t be happy if it does. The rationale for the decision would almost certainly be the Political Question doctrine, the revival of which would be a severe setback for the Legal Left. I look forward hopefully to Justice Scalia’s majority opinion and to the NLG/ABA/AAJ gnashing of teeth thereafter.

The alternative is to persuade the appointee to back out, by making it clear to him that he will spend an unhappy two years as a gate crasher. The Democratic leadership has to let him take the oath of office, but they can’t be compelled to admit him to the party caucus or give him committee assignments and decent office space. Members can ignore his bills and refuse to let him co-sponsor their own. The presiding officer can overlook him when he tries to speak on the floor. The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee can announce that he will get no support in 2010. Faced with the choice between a prosperous lobbying practice in Springfield and pariah status in Washington, Mr. Burris can be expected to ease himself out of the picture. Bobby Rush might call the bluff and dare Harry Reid et al. to consign the lone black Senator to the back of the bus. Roland Burris won’t.

Jennifer Rubin has a series of astute observations [links omitted]:

Harry Reid better have a more compelling argument than “fraud” to keep Roland Burris out of the senate. For starters, where’s the evidence of “fraud” and is Reid accusing Burris of some misdeed? By their brilliant strategy of opposing a special election, the Democrats have now ensured an unseemly and protracted legal and political free-for-all.

President-elect Obama is predictably “disappointed.” That, you may recall, is the officially-approved default reaction.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan whines that Blago’s pick of Burris leaves the state in a “terrible situation.” Hmmm. How could this have been prevented? Someone ask Sen. Dick Durbin.

I agree that Reid’s got a tough case: it’s not enough to say Blago is a crook and was considering a list of other people for a price. Blago’s move, in a way, is a brilliant bit of misdirection, but it does undermine any insanity defense. This is one clever pol.

My favorite quip, though, is Jonah Goldberg’s: “Roland Burris is more qualified to be undemocratically appointed to the Senate than Caroline Kennedy is.” He heads that “Stating the Obvious”, and it is.

I’ll admit to feeling pangs of sympathy for the Senator-designate. Although his persona practically defines “lackluster”, his biography is inspirational (even if he does say so himself). He grew up as a young black man in downstate Illinois at a time when racial attitudes there were only marginally more enlightened than in Alabama and was elected to statewide office on an essentially nonracial basis. It’s a pity that his career will be remembered not for those achievements but for this twilight fiasco.

Further reading: John Kass, “For Sheer Brazenness, Nobody Surpasses Rod”

BDS Will Always Find a Way

Washington Post lefty Richard Cohen is unimpressed by George W. Bush’s reading habits, which were summarized last week by none other than Karl Rove. For the past three years, Messrs. Bush and Rove have competed to see who could read more books. Mr. Rove has won all three contests, but the President’s total of 186 volumes (plus an annual reading of the complete Bible) is pretty impressive, especially given that he has a full-time job.

Mr. Cohen concedes that “the caricature of George Bush as unread” isn’t tenable, but his Bush Derangement Syndrome won’t let go.

Mr. Bush’s 2006 reading list [writes Mr. Rove] shows his literary tastes. The nonfiction ran from biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, LBJ and Genghis Khan to Andrew Roberts’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900, James L. Swanson’s Manhunt, and Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower. Besides eight Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald, Mr. Bush tackled Michael Crichton’s Next, Vince Flynn’s Executive Power, Stephen Hunter’s Point of Impact, and Albert Camus’s The Stranger, among others.

Fifty-eight of the books he read that year were nonfiction. Nearly half of his 2006 reading was history and biography, with another eight volumes on current events (mostly the Mideast) and six on sports. . . .

His list was particularly wide-ranging [in 2007], from history (The Great Upheaval and Khrushchev’s Cold War), biographical (Dean Acheson and Andrew Mellon), and current affairs (including Rogue Regime and The Shia Revival). He read one book meant for young adults, his daughter Jenna’s excellent Ana’s Story. . . .

His reading this year [2008] included a heavy dose of history – including David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter, Rick Atkinson’s Day of Battle, Hugh Thomas’s Spanish Civil War, Stephen W. Sears’s Gettysburg and David King’s Vienna 1814. There’s also plenty of biography – including U.S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, Jon Meacham’s American Lion, James M. McPherson’s Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief and Jacobo Timerman’s Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.

From this list, which others might regard as rather wide-ranging, Mr. Cohen infers that the President is an “intellectually insulated man”. A better inference is that the WaPo poseur is himself insulated, as well as – “trivial” is the word that comes to mind.

First off, he regards biography and history as no school for statesmen:

As might be expected, most of Bush’s books have been biographies and histories. Biographies are usually about great men who often did the unpopular thing and were later vindicated.

Such as “King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, LBJ and Genghis Khan”? Many great men have, it is true, followed their own best judgement instead of the immediate popular whim. I wonder why Mr. Cohen considers that to be a fact from which Presidents should be shielded.

As for histories, they are replete with cautionary tales. That might explain how the 1961 classic, Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War, made it onto this year’s presidential reading list. Had Hitler (and Mussolini) been stopped in Spain, much misery would have been avoided. Substitute Iraq for Spain and you have, for the president, some reassuring bedtime reading.

Written by a man who very obviously has never read Hugh Thomas – and especially not the 1961 first edition (we aren’t told which one the President read), the moral of which is that, for all of Franco’s narrowness and brutality, Spain was fortunate that he, rather than his Stalinoid adversaries, triumphed. The revised edition is harder on the Caudillo and displays a certain dreamy romanticism toward the anarcho-syndicalists, but it too is not a text into which one can read metaphors for Iraq.

The next complaint is the absence of left-wing tracts denouncing the Bush Presidency:

It lacks whole shelves of books on how and why the Iraq war was a mistake, one that metastasized into a debacle. Absent is Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Tom Ricks’s Fiasco, George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate or, on a related topic, Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side about “extraordinary rendition” and other riffs [sic] on the Constitution. Absent too is Barton Gellman’s Angler, about Dick Cheney, the waterboarder in chief.

Can anyone be more insulated than a man who still calls Iraq “a debacle”? As for the absent shelves, we, first of all, don’t know that the President hasn’t read any or all of these books. Mr. Rove identified about forty out of 186. Mr. Cohen assumes that none of them were written by Presidential critics; that assumption is his only evidence for the truth of his proposition.

Second, the cited works consist mostly of speculations about Mr. Bush’s motives and decision making processes. The President doesn’t need Tom Ricks to tell him what he directed in Iraq, Barton Gellman to inform him about his Vice President’s actions or Jane Mayer to extract sinister subtexts from his executive orders. As Matthew Franck asks, “[W]hy should the president read books by people who know less about the war and related matters than he does? Their arguments are familiar to him and their information is smaller.”

Regarding the President’s taste in fiction, we are given two observations. First:

Bush’s choice of the Camus classic [The Stranger] is odd on the face of it. It is a novel about estrangement, about an amoral, irreligious man (Meursault) who never shows emotion. It is a book out of my Gauloise-smoking youth, read in the vain pursuit of women of literary bent, and not something I would think an over-60 president would read. Maybe this is what happens when you have to give up jogging.

Ann Althouse goes to the bother of skewering that paragraph, but its vacuity needs no commentary. Next:

Bush read some novels, but they are mostly pre-movies, plotted not written, and lacking the beauty of worldly cynicism. I recommend Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. Delicious.

It would be catty to note that The Leopard was made into a movie and otiose to point out that, once again, the columnist doesn’t know that Mr. Bush has never read it. As I recall, it was at the peak of its popularity, particularly among youthful conservatives, when he and I were undergraduates.

But suppose that the Prince of Lampedusa’s tale had shown up on the Presidential list; wouldn’t it have been further evidence of “insulation”? Its “worldly cynicism” is directed against progress, secularism, equality and other conceits dear to a liberal pundit’s heart. And it is not “delicious”. In that pitifully failed stab at le mot juste is encapsulated the triviality of Richard Cohen.

Hear No Evil

It seemed to me that the evidence released by Patrick Fitzgerald about Milrad Blagojevich’s Senate seat auction made one point quite clear: Blago was angry with Team Obama because it wouldn’t offer anything more than “appreciation” in return for appointing its preferred candidate. Unless “appreciation” referred to a payoff in SAR’s, the President-elect and his entourage obviously had entered into no corrupt deals.

So how is it that the Team’s internal investigation reaches the implausible conclusion that none of them ever heard anything suspicious? Does Blago strike you as the sort who might solicit a bribe so subtly that young innocent Rahm Emanuel had no idea what was afoot?

And did Rep. Emanuel really inform Blago “whom [he] believed the president-elect favored” for the open Illinois Senate seat without having consulted his principal? Was The One really indifferent to who was chosen for the seat? Was his chief campaign strategist really speaking without knowledge when he told reporters that there had been Obama-Blagojevich talks about the matter?

The episode is weird enough to call to mind the words of the Psalm: The guilty flee where no man pursueth. Even when they aren’t quite sure what they’re guilty of.

A Paradox of Political Correctness

One of the year-end tasks demanded by my employer was to sit through an on-line training program entitled “Sexual Harassment for Supervisors”. No, it did not contain tips for picking up attractive young co-workers at Christmas Holiday parties. (Besides, who’s having a Holiday get-together this year?) Actually, it didn’t contain much of anything, consisting instead of a series of stilted dialogues among co-workers, from which one could infer that –

• Giving offense is very, very bad;

• Taking offense is almost always justified; and

• Failing to tattle on anyone whose statements or actions might give offense (whether or not anyone else was or could have been offended) is a bad career move.

As I watched (attentively, let me note – I scored 100 percent on the exit quiz), a thought crossed my mind. If telling a joke about a priest, a rabbi and a stripper going into a bar creates a “hostile work environment” (as one skit assured us it did, and we didn’t even get to hear the punch line!), what about a set of training materials mandatorily viewed by all of a company’s employees that portrays –

• The only recognizably Hispanic character (a woman named “Maria”) as a chronic complainer who makes false accusations against co-workers and adheres to a bizarre religious cult;

• One young black male as a pornography addict and a second as a potential rapist (the only young black males in the presentation – there are no old blacks of either sex);

• The only moderately elderly character (a 62-year-old white woman) as humorless and infirm; and

• All young white males as interested in little but sex, either as predators or as rather flummoxed prey to their (white female) supervisors?

Talk about hostile invocations of stereotypes! Shouldn’t any organization that propagates such bigotry be hailed before the EEOC?

Hmm, if I filed the complaint myself, could I snare enough of a settlement to pay for this year’s Christmas presents?

My Annual Comment on the “Christmas Wars”

James Taranto may be right in his view that the tiny coterie that wants to rid the world of Christmas has benefitted from Christian overreaction to their efforts. We ought to laugh at the ACLU, Americans United, PFAW and like-minded fanatics. Or we might subversively observe that their preferred substitute, “holiday”, is scarcely a secular term. Sure, it has dwindled into a synonym for “day of rest”, but that, too, is a religious reference. It is, in fact, only man, made in the image of God, that enjoys “holy days” free from labor. For our kin in the animal kingdom, December 25th is just another diurnal routine.

I wrote down my own thoughts about the “Christmas Wars” several years ago and have found no reason to alter them. Quoting myself in part:

The rationale for breaking the public connection between December 25th and Christianity is that government “support” of Christmas amounts to sponsorship of a particular religion. Yet very few secularists press that rationale to its obvious conclusion: If it is unacceptable for city employees to say “Merry Christmas”, how can one justify giving those same workers a day off in recognition of the birth of Jesus? Why shouldn’t Christians have to draw on their vacation allotments to observe their holy days, just like Jews and Moslems and Hindus and Buddhists? Closing down the entire country is surely a far more emphatic endorsement of Christianity than allowing school skits based on the gospels of Matthew and Luke. (The great Talmudic scholar Jacob Neusner once noted that his sister’s Jewish faith had not been undermined by several years of portraying the Virgin Mary in Christmas pageants.) . . .

Christians often complain about attacks on Christmas. Rarely do we ask why the assault is so half-hearted, so much less relentless than, for instance, the villification of Christianity for opposing abortion, promiscuity and homosexuality. I do not have a confident explanation but should like to offer a hopeful theory.

No man who looks at the universe from a purely naturalistic and secular perspective can be wholly satisfied, either intellectually or morally, by what he sees. The universe begins and ends in incomprehensible riddles. Between lies the greater riddle of why any being should show justice, mercy or love toward another except as a selfish means of obtaining the necessities and pleasures of existence. Secular ethics invariably winds up as either an unexamined acquiescence in transcendant morality or an elaborate justification for using others as means to our own ends.

The Incarnation of Our Lord offers a different, less despairing picture of who we are, and where, and why. Moreover, it is less threatening than that presented by much of the rest of Christian (or other religious) doctrine. God comes not as an irresistible King but as a helpless Baby. He knows our weakness and infirmity, because He has lived like us. Divine justice, mercy and love are more real, less like condescension, when they issue from one Who is truly human.

The Orthodox Church’s epistle reading for Christmas Day teaches, “But when the fullness of time came, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the power of the Law, in order that he might redeem those held under the power of the Law, in order, that is, that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba, Father!’ So then, you are no longer a slave but a son; and if you are a son, you are also an heir by God’s act of adopton.” (Galatians 4:4-7)

God and His Church cannot always speak to us sweetly and comfortably, but on Christmas Day they do, with a message of undiluted hope. That message is for everyone, and not even its fiercest disbelievers can, it appears, wholly regret that once a year our secular state grants a forum for its proclamation.

And since this post is a day late, Happy Boxing Day! (No endorsement of violent sporting events intended.)

Quote of the Day

James S. Robbins:

The number of daily attacks in Iraq has fallen almost 95% from levels a year ago. Also of note, the murder rate in Iraq in November was 0.9 per 100,000 people. That is lower than the rate from before Saddam was overthrown. For those keeping score, the 2007 murder rate in the US was 5.9 per 100,000. Can we declare victory yet?

Yes, we can – so long as we give all credit to The One and denounce George W. Bush’s failed, incompetent policies.

Kipling and Blago and Barry

Like patriotism, Kipling is a last refuge of scoundrels. So Milrad Blagojevich recited a few lines from “If” in the course of declaring that he won’t [bleeping] quit his [bleeping] office, [bleep] you! Naturally, Kipling fans couldn’t resist the challenge to rewrite the poem with verses better suited to Blago himself. Claudia Rosett, whose coverage of the U.N. has made her an expert on corruption, offers a wonderful pastiche beginning:

If you can keep your job while all about you
Are fielding bribes and blaming it on you,
If you can duck the Feds while all men doubt you,
And bleep-ing show the charges are untrue,
If you can fight and not be tired by fighting,
Or, being wiretapped, profess surprise,
Or argue that there will be no indicting
Because it’s all a bleep-ing pack of lies. . . .

The version at Athens & Jerusalem can’t be quoted on a family friendly blog, as it portrays Blago’s distinctive verbal tic more directly. The versifier notes, “It’s much easier to make a line scan when you can just throw in obscenities wherever you want. I’m surprised Homer never used this technique.”

Blago is a comic turn. The serious side of this affair is summed up in the proverb, “Lie down with the dogs, and you get up with the fleas.” Before he skyrocketed to the Presidency, Barack Obama had two notable sets of associates: anti-American radicals and “Chicago Way” political fixers. He has been cutting his ties with the former at a furious pace. The latter he has pretended not to see, and they may not be so easy to dispose of. We’ve been told that the President-elect has been perusing biographies of Abraham Lincoln. May I suggest that he might find more pertinent instruction by reading up on the administrations of Warren Harding and Ulysses S. Grant?

“Depression” Is Now the Right Label

To my e-mail box this morning came a link to news from New Haven that convinces me the economy truly is in dire straits:

Mory’s eating club is closing its doors today for winter break — and staying closed for several months as it rethinks its future, the club announced Friday. . . .

“The Club has recently been facing a ‘perfect storm’ of economic issues, including operating losses driven by the business declines faced by virtually all restaurants, and a decline in the value of its endowment due to the market,” wrote the Mory’s Association in a press release Friday.

“Aggressive steps to address the problems, such as staying open later hours, revisions to the menu and other measures to cut costs have not been sufficient,” the release read.

To my mind, Mory’s, where I passed so many happy days as an undergraduate, is a worthier candidate for a bailout than the Little Two in Detroit. Now that I think about it, the President surely agrees, though it may be impolitic for him to say so.

There is, as it happens, a parallel to the auto industry. The factors that made Mory’s vulnerable to recession are, in broad terms, the same as for GM and Chrysler: government constraints on its product and overmighty labor unions. In lieu of CAFE, it must cope with minimum drinking age laws, which Connecticut’s neo-Puritan left-wing government enforces with increasing rigor. At the same time, the cost of its unionized labor is over twice as high, as a percentage of sales, as the restaurant industry average. Without that burden, the place would be showing a hefty profit. An article in the Yale Alumni Rag Magazine summarizes the grim facts:

[I]n 2006, according to the club’s 990 tax form, Mory's took in $1,224,340 in revenue and spent $1,392,576, of which $904,942 went to salaries, benefits, and other payroll-related expenses. “That kind of labor cost would bury just about any operation,” says Patricia Dailey, editorial director at Restaurants and Institutions magazine. Labor costs for restaurants typically equal about a third of gross sales; at Mory’s, even when dues and other income are added to gross sales, labor costs came to 78 percent in 2006.

The article goes on, in the spirit of political correctness, to attribute the club’s difficulties to inadequate conformity to the zeitgeist, viz., “stuffiness”, a vestigial dress code and remnants of Old Blue traditions. A simpler explanation lies in the numbers just cited. Were labor costs 50 percent of revenue – still substantially above competitors’ – a $170,000 deficit would be a $120,000 surplus. If it were also possible for underage Yalies – three-quarters of the student population – to buy a drink, the outlook would be rosier yet.

Alas, the Age of Obama is unlikely to extend its toleration to such remedies. And there is a thought more depressing than any economic slump.

A Moment in History

Eighteen hundred years ago, a small Roman army assaulted a hilltop in south cental Germany. After pounding the position with arrows, javelins and ballista bolts, the attackers swept up the north slope and overran the ridge line.

Who the defenders were and why the battle took place, we are never likely to know. The fighting itself, however, has left an after-image behind, now in the process of reconstruction by archeologists. Spiegel Online reports:

The site first came to light in the summer of 2000, when local metal detector hobbyists found some pieces of metal while looking for a medieval fort. The fragments languished for years, until the men finally decided to turn them in to Petra Loenne, the Northeim area archaeologist. . . .

Loenne quickly assembled a team of archaeologists and historians – and local metal detector hobbyists with good connections to the archaeological authorities. Her priority was to locate any more artifacts close to the surface as quickly as possible. “We had to hurry and excavate before word got out and looters arrived,” Loenne says.

Over the course of three months, they found a Roman-era battlefield spread over more than a mile of dense German forest. Standing under towering pines on Monday, Loenne said the battlefield may be one of the largest ever discovered intact from that era.

Metal detector hobbyists working under the watchful eye of Loenne and her team located over 600 metal objects, from Roman sandal nails to arrowheads and six-inch long iron spear points that once capped javelins fired from ballistae, a sort of giant crossbow.

The hill where clash took place, known as Harzhorn, is about 40 miles due south of Hannover. Coins and radiocarbon evidence indicate a date in the first half of the Third Century A.D. The article, in the fashion typical of modern journalism, tries to turn these facts into an historical mystery. Harzhorn, it claims, is “hundreds of miles north of the Roman frontier”. In fact, consultation with the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World shows that the distance to the imperial limes was no more than a hundred miles, less than a week’s march for legionnaires, and this was no quiet frontier. In 213 the Emperor Caracalla turned back an invasion by the Alamanni, and border raids were endemic. Rome had long ago decided against trying to make trans-Rhenish Germany a province, but it had a keen interest in what went on there.

If an archeologist quoted by Spiegel correctly gauges the numbers involved – “about a thousand men on the Roman side” – the attacking troops were a reinforced cohort, a unit that might have been dispatched to pursue barbarian raiders, intervene in behalf of a well-disposed chieftain or avenge an insult to Roman honor.

Aside from its intrinsic interest, this find reminds us that the past is filled with events of which we have no inkling. Our knowledge of German affairs between 200 and 250 A.D. might fill a full page if one used large type and wide margins, yet it was in fact a turbulent place and time. The small expedition to Harzhorn was, we may be sure, far from the only incident of this kind – deeds lost to our memory but as real as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

What I Really Want for Christmas

Of course I’ve reached the age at which one hopes that “more blessed to give than to receive” is a literal truth, but if I were still young enough to believe in Santa. . . .

Did I ever imagine that, within my own lifetime rather than in some far-off Asimovian future, it would be possible to buy a personal supercomputer? The price is £4,000, which isn’t cheap but isn’t outlandish either, and falling every day.

Alternatively, some guy has rigged up a prototype of a personal Predator drone. Not in production yet, and it may take another Heller decision to make it available in Chicago, but truly nifty.

How Much Fixing Can 401(k)’s Take?

Saturday’s Wall Street Journal worries about how to “fix” 401(k) plans. The article discusses two distinct, widely disparate problems. One is that financial markets go up and down, so that someone who puts money into a 401(k) account runs the risk that his savings will decline in value. That is, of course, the point that a sophisticated grasshopper would have made to the ant. It’s an argument for making retirement income the responsibility of each generation’s offspring, with private thrift no more than a way to acquire luxuries. (In the Jiminy Cricket version of the fable, the grasshopper sings, “The world owes me a living”, demonstrating that he understands the implications of his own philosophy.)

The second problem (one that ought not to trouble those who regard the first as intractable, but who says pundits have to be consistent?) is that many individuals either can’t or don’t accumulate much through the 401(k) route. They may not be employed, or their employers may not sponsor plans, or they may not be attracted by the 401(k) tax incentives, or they may dissipate their accounts for short-term needs before retirement.

Evaluating the success or failure of section 401(k) (along with its various cousins: IRA’s, 403(b)’s, 457(b)’s, SIMPLE’s and SARSEP’s – how they differ is part of my professional life but needn’t interest you) should begin by taking an accurate view of their role in the provision of retirement income. While it isn’t literally inaccurate to call 401(k)’s “the backbone of the nation’s private retirement savings system”, for most workers they are less important than Social Security, and that importance declines with income. For low earners, Social Security replaces a majority of preretirement income. For example, a worker whose wages are consistently about half the national average can retire with a Social Security pension nominally equal to around 55 percent of his prior income; its actual value is greater, because it is (for a taxpayer with little other income) exempt from income and FICA taxes. Not much support from other sources is needed to boost these folks’ tax-adjusted income replacement ratios to the roughly 80 percent level that financial advisors typically recommend. A modest employer-provided pension or a relatively small nest egg will fill the gap.

Supplementing Social Security grows more essential as one’s income rises. While the low earner starts retirement over two-thirds of the way to the 80 percent threshold, somebody who has always had earnings equal to the FICA taxable wage base ($102,000 in 2008) would retire this year with a Social Security benefit of only about $27,000 a year. If he is to live at all comfortably in retirement, he will have to find twice that amount elsewhere.

Retirement income is, then, a middle class (and even upper class) issue. That tax incentives for saving are skewed toward the more affluent should occasion no shock; that is where incentives are needed. Looked at another way, the government provides well (wisely is a separate question) for the retirement of the bottom half of wage scale. No one expects (or should want) it to do the same for others. On the other hand, it ought not to tax away their efforts to help themselves.

Nonetheless, the remedies suggested by the experts whom the WSJ’s reporter consulted – an expanded savers’ tax credit, automatic enrollment in 401(k) plans, automatic employer contributions to IRA’s, etc. – will do the most where the need is least.

The Bush Administration – remember them? – tried to tackle this problem six years ago with a proposal for a three-tiered set of tax-favored savings accounts. One tier would have been a mildly modified version of the present 401(k) plan (relabeled “employer retirement savings accounts”). The others were called “lifetime savings accounts” and “retirement savings accounts”. LSA’s and RSA’s would not have been linked to employment. Anyone could contribute up to a maximum of one-half the 401(k) limit to each. Updated to reflect the 2009 limitations for 401(k) plans, the maximums would be $8,250 for an LSA, $8,250 for an RSA and $16,500 for an ERSA ($22,000 at age 50 and older).

The difference between LSA’s and RSA’s is that withdrawals from the former would have been permitted at any time for any reason, while RSA withdrawals before age 58, death or disability would have been penalized. The theory was that the existing penalties for premature withdrawals discourage contributions. Under the proposal, even the least provident would have a strong incentive to hold all but their shortest term savings in LSA’s, where they would earn tax-free income.

These concepts deserve revival. My own notion would be somewhat more expansive: Decouple 401(k) plans and similar vehicles completely from an individual’s employer, replacing them with LSA’s and RSA’s. I would set the LSA contribution limit at $10,000 a year, the RSA limit at $40,000. Employers could continue to make nonelective contributions to profit sharing plans (and, of course, to sponsor defined benefit plans), while employees’ elective contributions would move to these new vehicles. To overcome inertia, five percent of employees’ wages would be remitted automatically to LSA’s (from which they could be immediately withdrawn, so no one would be compelled to save). To minimize the short-term impact on government revenues, taxation would follow the Roth pattern of nondeductible contributions and tax-free withdrawals. The present value of the taxes is the same, whether they are collected on the front or the back end.

Many liberals have never liked section 401(k) and its cousins. In line with the maxim of never letting a crisis go to waste, they may see the budding recession as an opportunity to cast these disagreeable vehicles out in favor of something like Teresa Ghilarducci’s scheme for converting 401(k) plans into forced loans to the government.

Unhappily, no one has yet figured out how to remove risk from investing without also eliminating reward. I’m surprised, and mildly appalled, that Alicia Munnell, who certainly knows better, can declare, “As a major source of retirement income, [the 401(k) system) has shown itself unreliable – a point the financial crisis has driven home”. Saving for retirement is properly a project for one’s full working lifetime, a period of 35 years or longer. Those savings are then typically drawn down over 25 or 30 years. Over intervals of those lengths, bull and bear markets are of trifling importance. The great danger is long-term stagnation brought on by foolish government policies, and that is a danger that no retirement system, except for Anthony Trollope’s Fixed Period, can overcome.