Robert Pozen, the expert on legalized gambling who devised President Bush's Social Security privatization scheme, has apparently backed away from private accounts. Think Progress has the story from CQ.

Just out from CQ, password req’d:

[Pozen] said Wednesday that Bush should “back away” from the other half [of his Social Security plans] – the insistence that individual investment accounts be created in the program. …

“I would advise the president to say that carve-out accounts are no longer required,” Pozen said in an interview after a debate at the American Enterprise Institute with Brookings Institution scholar Peter R. Orszag, a leading critic of Bush’s proposal. Bush, Pozen said, should indicate that he is “willing to have a package that, if otherwise satisfactory, does not have carve-out accounts.”

Not only that, Pozen challenged the wider theme that Bush has used to justify private accounts:

For many conservatives, the philosophical importance of creating accounts from the payroll tax cannot be understated. They believe it would turn many lower-income workers into investors, ushering in a new “ownership society"…

Pozen disagrees. … Talk of an “ownership society,” Pozen said Wednesday, is “a weak basis” for arguing for an overhaul.

Not quite the bode of confidence the President might hope for from the man who came up with his Social Security plan.