WILLisms.com: Reform Thursday: Week Twelve.

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Reform Thursday: Week Twelve.

Thursdays are good days for reform, because they fall between Wednesdays and Fridays.

That's why WILLisms.com will display a chart or graph, every Thursday, pertinent to Social Security reform. The graphics are mostly self-explanatory, but we include commentary on some of them where and when necessary.

This week's Reform Thursday is based on figures from the Heritage Foundation's Personal Retirement Account Calculator.

The calculator, unlike the discredited one Democrats are still using to pull the wool over the eyes of Americans, uses incredibly conservative estimates of growth, well below the 6.8% average annual rate of return of the stock market, for example. It would be hard to accuse this calculator of being "rigged." While there is no concrete plan on the table, Heritage has done a fantastic job developing a tool derived from the principles outlined.

In all of our calculations, we used married males, broken down by lower, middle, and higher incomes.

First, a 24-year-old:

Next, a 34-year-old:

Next, a 44-year-old:

Next, a 54-year-old:

Notice that those making more modest incomes have far more to gain, proportionally, from reform than power couples making bigger bucks. Critics are simply wrong when they declare Social Security reform to be some kind of enrich the rich scheme. Working and middle class people must realize that Social Security reform is precisely about empowering individuals. Reform will introduce millions to America's engine of wealth, the ownership society.

We used these numbers for the income scales-
LOWER: [25,000-29,999, plus wife making 10,000-14,999]

MIDDLE: [50,000-54,999, plus wife making 25,000-29,999]

HIGHER: [both making 85,000+]

More on the calculator's methodology, lest the cynics inevitably declare that it is just as rigged as the Democrats' version, but in the opposite direction:

The Calculator uses a fixed annual return of 4.9 percent minus administrative costs, for a total return of 4.6 percent. A 4.9 percent return is the forecasted return used in the President's assumptions. This is actually less than the rate of return projected by the Congressional Budget Office (See "Long-Term Analysis of Plan 2 of the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security," September 30, 2004) and the same rate of return as that projected by Social Security's actuaries (See, e.g., "Estimated Financial Effects of 'The Saving Social Security Act of 2005,'" March 10, 2005).

For more information, and to try the calculator out, go here: