Remember when Bush was talking Private Option to Social Security?

I see they have a much greater return due to compounded interest and reinstatement of capital gains and dividends, something SS doesn't do.  Good story

Very good, René, very good. 

Are you certain it is news?  Coming from Fox, it may be opinion, or so i've heard.

While it is extremely interesting, i can't see gummit ever letting go of the SS revenue stream. Way too much money and control, for them to give it up.

It is pretty important for many of the ruling class to have folks know that Big Daddy gunna take care of them.

And when the next great depression wipes out all those publicly traded assets, these people will have no access to the very program that they despise. Good luck.

The same happens in Canada where the funds collected for Employment Insurance and Canada Pension Plan have been put into general revenue to disguise the fact that the government was running a deficit.

Thanks Rene. You got it right.

Did you know that NowPublic has very close connections to FoxNews? Fox News is Republican....Nowpublic just jumped on a sinking ship

http://my.nowpublic.com/world/co-founders-nowpublic-soldout-billionare-philip-anschutz

The Rev.

What people misunderstand is that both social security and private investment plans involve ways of extracting wealth from an uncertain future economy to pay the bill.  That is, future retirements WILL be paid by future workers, one way or the other.  You HAVE to look beyond the window dressing to see the big picture.First - remember that retirement money doesn't go into a black hole and disappear, any more than paychecks do - it gets spent and recycled into the economy in buying goods and services, with the normal multipliers.  The only difference is that retirees are not expected to contribute to the national "productivity" that produces the wealth, while workers are.  This applies to both SSI and private retirements.For social security this is obvious - SSI is a pay as you go plan.  If the economy really tanks, there will be less worker income to tax to pay to then current retirees (who in turn paid for the retirement of their own elders).  A bigger problem is demographics, with the baby boom surge beginning to retire and changing the worker/retiree ratio.How about private retirement funds?  Guess what - these funds are not invested on Mars or some external economy which is guaranteed to pay them back with guaranteed interest.  Any retirement payments still have to be extracted from that same economy by a non-productive person and spend (recycled) on the same kinds of goods and services.  The baby boom ratio issue is the same - somehow fewer workers need to produce enough extra wealth to fund the retirement payments - the number of non-productive retirees and productive workers doesn't change.However the "extraction" process is more hidden, as it's done through corporate profit margins, extracted from the difference between product/service costs and the pay received by the workers providing the product/services.  So you have a nice big figure in your private retirement account which is owed you because you own the money - those bits stored in a computer are not worth much if there isn't enough real weath in the system to pay you back.  Any discrepancy between "money owed to retirees" and "actual money available" will be resolved through private bankruptcies and defaults, and lowered stock valuation.  So either the retiree or the working generation is going to be left holding the bag; making it private enterprise doesn't change that.Put this another way.  Suppose that 80 million people own stock worth 8 trillion today, and which must grow to be worth 30 trillion a few decades from now - IN TODAYS DOLLARS, so adjust for inflation.  They all decide to cash in over the next 25 years.  Where does the money they take out come from?  It's not sitting in corporate vaults as gold or on Mars in a different economy, to be withdrawn as simply as one person alone could do.  You have to find somebody to BUY those 30 trillion dollars of stock from you, somebody not living on retirement.So, maybe the workers of 2050 are feeling optimistic and investing like crazy in the stock market - individually or through pension funds, and happy to buy those 30 trillion dollars worth of stock.  But they are only doing so because they hope the workers of  2100 will in turn buy that stock in turn for 100 trillion when they in turn want to retire.When this works the way it is supposed to, THE WHOLE GAME IS A PONZI SCHEME in this sense, not just SSI.  You just don't see it when it's hidden, but the underlying numbers don't change.So what else is different?  Instead of buying that stock for 30 trillion, the future workers might pay less, maybe even less than you paid for it.  Maybe they don't have the money because the economy isn't strong, or maybe they have lost trust in the following generation buying up all their stock.  So those 80 million current workers's planned retirement funding can go bust a few years down the road, and in terms of capitalism this is considered a successful market readjustment, NOT A FAILURE.  It's only a failure in human terms, if you are one of those people - you bet on a ponzi scheme that didn't pan out, so you eat dog food and the system continues.On the whole, you cannot insulate those 80 million people from this.  Sure, they could buy a private "defined benefit annuity" that promises to pay X amount no matter what happens to stock markets or the economy - but the company making such promises doesn't have all that money invested on Mars; they HAVE to make the same buy-low sell-higher bets that you would make, and if the money doesn't come in they have to fold and leave you high and dry.Of course, if the company has huge profits somewhere else they could cross subsidize your benefits even tho the investments they made with your premiums didn't pan out.  But they can't do that for everybody at once!Or there could be inflation, where you get the dollars promised you but they are not worth much (this affects both SSI and private funds).The curse and the benefit of the SSI tax funded retirement is that it cannot just decimate the promised benefits and call that a successful market adjustment.  There will be political pressure to continue to make payments that support some kind of standard of living for retirees, come economic problems or inflation or war.  By the way, depositing in banks is no better in this big picture.  The money still has to come from somewhere - on the big picture scale, more withdrawal by retirees than workers are depositing will cause the banks to collapse too, in too great of numbers for the FDIC to cover.  Or you could invest in government bonds - but the payouts from those has to come from the same taxpayers who would instead have to bail out SSI, and (in the big picture) this subsidy will have to roughly match the SSI subsidy if the payments are to match SSI payments.One major difference between SSI and private retirement is that the suffering in the former will be relatively more uniform, while in the latter the pain will be just as great but will be more unevenly distributed.