Without some change in this direction, any reform won't be worth the name. This is a change wholly consistent with our economic and technological times. Social Security was a creature of its time, the era of government social insurance that developed to appease the worker insecurities of the industrial age. This concept began in 19th-century Europe under Bismarck and migrated across the Atlantic in the early 20th. But we are now leaving that industrial era for the information age, in which individuals are far better equipped than they were 60 years ago to handle their own retirement choices.
Markets go down as well as up, to be sure.
But even Americans with scarce savings have been able to learn that stocks return more in the long run than any other investment, and certainly more than government transfer payments are likely to provide. For Republicans it means losing their post-FDR fear of debating the subject. The way Mr. Clinton demagogued them in 1996 on Medicare, we can understand if they don't trust the President's bipartisan assurances now. Yet the polls we see also show that private retirement accounts are popular among most voting groups, and especially among such Clinton strongholds as the young and working women. This is a big GOP opportunity.