Nevin's Data "Points"

I’ve spent most of my life, certainly my adult life, confident that Americans, certainly in large part, are reasonable and rational. I have not, unfortunately, always been as sure of certain subsets of the population, notably politicians. On numerous occasions during the political season just past, as one outrageous claim after another was laid at the feet of one candidate or another (and sometimes both), I heard (and was heard to utter) “rebuttals” of a sort—“They’d NEVER do that,” for example, or at least, “They’d never get away with that.” Granted, sometimes I’d say those words—and yet wonder if, this time, “they” actually might. One’s position on such things is inevitably interwoven with one’s comfort with the idea, of course. “Anything’s possible” can be both an anthem of positive change and an ominous portent of doom. Those were the kinds of reactions that last fall’s hearings on the impact of the markets on retirement engendered, certainly in terms of the reactions to comme...