Of course, if we had any details of George W. Bush's plan to partially privatize Social Security, this would be an easier column to write. Which is exactly why you won't see him filling in the blanks anytime soon. The much-ballyhooed bankruptcy of the Social Security system is based on the unlikely premise that the economy will grow no faster than 1.7 percent a year. For the past three decades, the economy has grown at twice that rate. We need to do something about Social Security, particularly given the demographic bulge of the baby boomers, who will begin retiring in 2011.
Politicians hate all three.
The Gore plan is to keep dumping the system's surplus and some general revenue into paying down the national debt. This will have several happy side effects. Bush's plan is to privatize part of Social Security on the theory that money invested in the stock market will earn more than the no-risk bond investments of the current system. The first thing you'd have to do is design a system in which people couldn't, in fact, control their own money. If you give people on the economic margin 2 percent of their FICA tax, the first thing they do is buy shoes for the baby and the second thing is pay off the electric.