Democrats are targeting Paul Ryan and his Roadmap for America’s Future as the Wisconsin Republican is set to give the GOP response to the president’s state of the union address tonight. But while the Roadmap, Ryan’s proposal to rein in the federal budget deficit, is getting the attention from the likes of Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, it’s not clear that he and other Democrats are fully aware of what the plan lays out.

Schumer, the chair of the Democrats’ Senate policy committee, said this morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that, “what Paul Ryan suggests — privatization — is really a dismantling of Social Security.” In fact, the parts of the Roadmap that address Social Security state that only those citizens under the age of 55 will have the choice to invest a partial amount of their FICA tax into private accounts—hardly a complete “privatization” as Schumer has stated. Here’s the relevant part from the plan (emphases mine):

This proposal addresses the shortcomings of the current system and strengthens the retirement safety net by providing workers with the voluntary option of investing a portion of their FICA payroll taxes into personal savings accounts. Due to the higher rate of return received by investments in secure funds consisting of equities and bonds, these accounts would allow workers to build a significant nest egg for retirement that far exceeds what the current program can provide. Each account will be the property of the individual, and fully inheritable, which will allow workers to pass on any remaining balances in their accounts to their descendants. Individuals 55 and older will remain in the current system and will not be affected by this proposal in any way: they will receive the benefits they have been promised, and have planned for, during their working years. All other workers will have a choice to stay in the current system or begin contributing to personal accounts. Those who choose the personal account option will have the opportunity to begin investing a significant portion of their payroll taxes into a series of funds managed by the U.S. government. The system would closely resemble the investment options available to Members of Congress and Federal employees through the Thrift Savings Plan [TSP]. As these personal accounts continue to accumulate wealth, they will eventually replace the funding that comes through the government’s pay-as-you-go system. This will reduce the demand on government spending, lead to a larger overall benefit for retired workers, and restore solvency to the Social Security Program.

Asked today by THE WEEKLY STANDARD if he had read the Roadmap, Schumer gave no response. Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill, on the other hand, confirmed that she has read the plan.

“There’s parts of it I like,” McCaskill said. “Frankly, I’m not big on letting Social Security be subject to the vagaries of Wall Street.”

But what if this is a private choice by the individual, as the plan outlines? “I just think that most people, after what we’ve seen on Wall Street the last few years—Really?” she said. “We want to put Social Security in that crowd? I think that’s a bad idea.”

Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said he had read the Roadmap. “I don’t think it does nearly enough to deal with the debt,” Conrad said. “It doesn’t balance until 2063, and in the meantime it runs up trillions of dollars in additional debt.”

Conrad was presumably talking about the claim in the Roadmap that based on CBO estimates, Social Security would be solvent by 2069. And as Ryan has argued, the goal of the plan is to reduce the budget deficit as a way to decrease the amount of borrowing the federal government must do. Both Conrad and McCaskill noted that Ryan did not vote for the president’s debt commission’s proposal.

And Richard Durbin, the number two Democrat in the Senate, did not say what he thought of the Roadmap. “I use Google Maps,” Durbin said.