I'll have to see the proposal to see how it works before I can pass judgment on it.
In principle, the SS program is already somewhat biased toward the poor. The benefit scale is skewed toward the poor, for example. This is one of the arguments against personal accounts -- even though the rich and the poor can both put money into them, the poor could be asked to give up a bigger return than the rich, since the poor's dollar taken out of the government part of the fund has a higher 'rate of return' than the rich. I BELIEVE, but am not sure, that this particular skewing is based each year on your earnings for the year, so it two people retire and neither has any money but one paid a lot more into the program than the other, the one who paid more will get more, but the "rate of return" for that person is less than that of the poor person.
The 2nd way it is unbalanced is based strictly on how much money you make after retirement -- it is the taxation of your SS benefits if you have too much other income.
What Bush seems to be proposing is a third application of the principle. Again, I don't know what the plan is yet, but I imagine he is going to apply some of the "benefit cuts" such as the change in indexing, but apply them based on income (not sure if it is on each year's pay, or based on income after retirement). If you are going to cut benefits, but you don't have to cut them that much, it may make sense to cut them only for those for whom it wouldn't push them into poverty.
After all, if the elderly are below poverty, we are just going to give them money through other programs anyway.
But it isn't "extra" money for the poor, it is keeping the "promise" of current benefits for the poor, while breakign that promise for richer people.
Now, if you assume that the people making more money each year are more likely to do the personal accounts, then the money THEY take out of the system is money that had a LOWER rate of return. In other words, for the money they take out, they will come out even better (or less worse). IN actuality, their return in the personal accounts will be no less under either plan.
But there is an interesting twist if this program is an indexing on current benefits. The rich who put money into personal accounts will actually LOSE less by taking their money out, because the money they take out will be that "returned" at a lower rate, while they leave in the first money which is "returned" at a higher rate (kind of the reverse of what happens with indexed taxation).
So, you might see the program sold like this:
In exchange for being allowed to invest their money, the rich accept a graduated return on investment. But the more they invest privately, the less it matters to them; and the money they take out is the money that had the lowest rate of return.
Meanwhile, the poor don't have to take chances with private accounts, because this deal has guaranteed them their higher benefits if they want to stay in.
I'm not ready to sign on, but I'm not going to dismiss this, it seems to have some merit.
Remember, we are starting from the baseline of a program that should never have existed, and should by all rights be eliminated if not for the promises already made. You can't expect the fix to smell like roses; you can only hope it has less of an odor than when you started.
Define rich.