No pension for you!

National Democratic chairman Howard Dean launched an attack on President Bush yesterday on private pensions.

Dean sought to broaden the debate over Bush's proposal to restructure Social Security to include the issue of private pensions, citing Labor Department statistics estimating that private companies underfunded their pension plans by $450 billion last year, reported The Washington Post.

The only solution that Dean suggested is to make pensions portable, saying pension plans "ought not to be controlled by companies, they ought to be controlled by the people who those pensions belong to." Pension portability was not a major issue in the Democrats' 2004 presidential campaign.

If Social Security (which has worked well for three-quarters of a century and which many believe is not in crisis) is privatized like the president wants and private pensions are massively underfunded, then what will the next generation of senior citizens live on?

But I'm sure President Bush won't have to worry. Something tells me that presidential pensions are properly funded and that former chief executives won't be reduced to eating cat food in their old age.