shelbinator.com

That was obviously one of my favorite take-aways from Mitt Romney’s visit to the Varsity: that Hillary Clinton was on crack for thinking we were “all in it together,” because we are an “on your own” society (take a moment to relish the structural oxymoron). This week, Daniel Gross has written one of the mostest awesomest pieces ever on the subject for Slate.com, and you all must go read it. From The Empty 401(k): If White House Press Secretary Tony Snow won’t save for retirement, why should you:

Snow has also been a chief spokesman for the Bush administration’s domestic agenda, forced to argue continually that the typical American is doing just fine, and bravely pushing the unpopular elements of Bush’s vaunted “ownership society”: privatizing social security, eliminating defined-benefit pensions in favor of 401(k)s; and replacing insurance with health savings accounts, high-deductible policies, and other consumer-driven health-care initiatives.

And yet Snow’s own life in many ways symbolizes the downside of the ownership society—and suggests how much a government role in health and retirement benefits is necessary.

When Snow came to the White House after several years at the Fox News Channel, it was clear that he had relied entirely on others to save for his retirement. Snow conceded: “As a matter of fact, I was even too dopey to get in on a 401(k). So there is actually no Fox pension. The only media pension I have is through AFTRA [a union].” Even though his employer provided a 401(k) and would have matched contributions, and even though he was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, Snow had not shown either the interest or financial capability to manage his own retirement benefits.
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Snow admitted to feeling pinched on his salary of $168,000, which is about 3.5 times the median U.S. income.
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[Snow’s cancer] treatment is enormously expensive and only available to people who have good insurance — like the kind taxpayers fund for public employees such as Snow. Had Snow stashed a few thousand dollars in a health savings account, which is one of the administration’s chief proposals to reduce the rising number of the uninsured, he likely wouldn’t have enough cash to afford chemotherapy. Were any of [the 47 million uninsured Americans] to be afflicted with cancer as Snow has been, they’d be largely out of luck — unable to pay the bills for all those scans and chemo doses, and unable to find an insurer willing to cover such a pre-existing condition.

Just like the Log Cabin bois, it must feel great to be Tony Snow, spinning propaganda in favor of an administration’s policies that basically would have buggered him senseless and onto Skid Row — or into the grave, as likely as not — if he really were an “average American.”