Kline is Rated 0% by Alliance for Retired Americans

Kline scores 0% by the ARA on senior issues

The mission of the Alliance for Retired Americans is to ensure social and economic justice and full civil rights for all citizens so that they may enjoy lives of dignity, personal and family fulfillment and security. The Alliance believes that all older and retired persons have a responsibility to strive to create a society that incorporates these goals and rights and that retirement provides them with opportunities to pursue new and expanded activities with their unions, civic organizations and their communities.

As this weekend is the 70th anniversity of Social Security, it seemed fitting to talk about Kline's dismal record in supporting seniors and Social Security.

John Kline advocates having individually controlled retirement investment accounts (which implies investment in the Stock Market, Bond Market, and Money market). Basically John Kline is supporting Wall Street Financers over working Minnesotans, seniors and the disabled.

Why Privatization doesn’t work:

The privatization plan threatens workers and families now receiving disability payments.
It doesn’t resolve Social Security’s financing problems and in fact is projected to make them worse.
What you will receive will be dependent on if the market is up or down when you retire. This makes it more like a game of chance or gambling verse the current stable and established social security guidelines.
All the other countries that have done privatization have gotten disappointing and failing results.
The weakest among us, minorities and women stand to lose the most under privatization.
It would create a new government bureaucracy that cost more to substain that the current system.
There is nothing to hedge the new program against future inflation.

With minor changes the current program can meet all the future needs of our aging population.

Why Kline rates a ZERO:

John Kline is a lapdog. When there is a choice between serving Minnesotans or the man in the oval office, Rep. John Kline’s record speaks for itself. John Kline looks out for the interests of big business and Wall Street over Minnesotans.

Brokerage houses, banks, and mutual funds have been very active in the campaign to privatize Social Security. Small wonder, since they stand to gain enormous fees if billions of dollars are shifted each year from Social Security payments into accounts under Wall Street management. Of course, those fees must come from somewhere, namely from the balances in individual accounts. So is it really a surprise when one of the largest contributers to Kline in 2004 was Voyager Financial Services!

Among the one hundred best stock mutual funds, management fees range from 0.2 percent per year to 1.4 percent of the asset value of an account. The average is near the high end of that range, however, and many mutual funds charge substantially more. Smaller accounts require proportionately larger management fees because many costs such as gathering and mailing out information do not depend on account size. Indeed, most mutual funds actively discourage small accounts by setting a minimum opening deposit of $1,000 to $3,000.

Experience in the United Kingdom offers a warning about what the future could bring regarding management costs. Workers there have been allowed to open private accounts starting in 1988, since which time management fees and marketing costs among financial intermediaries have eaten up an average of 43 percent of the return on investment.