Allan Hubbard’s circular reasoning

The White House drive to privatize Social Security clearly isn’t going too well, but that doesn’t mean Bush aides have been pushed into making sense. Exhibit A: Allan Hubbard.

The top White House economic adviser rejected as “absolutely a non-starter” bipartisan proposals that the administration put aside its drive to create individual investment accounts in Social Security and focus first on extending the system’s solvency.

Allan Hubbard, in an interview Wednesday with USA Today, also dismissed a Democratic proposal that investment accounts be created to supplement Social Security, not as part of the system.

“President Bush’s No. 1 goal is passing legislation that permanently solves the solvency problem, and ‘add-on’ accounts do not deal with the solvency problem,” Hubbard said in his first on-the-record interview since he became head of the National Economic Council in January.

Admittedly, the standards are pretty low for logical discourse here — we’re dealing with the Bush gang and a plan to gut Social Security — but these comments seem even less sensible than usual.

Let’s see, Hubbard says private accounts must be part of the effort, even though the White House has acknowledged that private accounts would do nothing to keep the system solvent. Simultaneously, Hubbard says add-on accounts aren’t good enough because they “do not deal with the solvency problem,” which Hubbard describes as the primary goal of this entire initiative.

In other words, there’s a solvency problem, which they seek to fix with private accounts, which they admit won’t help the solvency problem.

It’s a shame to see what happens to economists who are forced to spend time in the Bush White House, isn’t it?