There was the opportunity to fix this a couple of years ago with privatized Social Security. Unfortunately, the plan was badly sold and buried in partisan bickering.

The Commission to Study Social Security (Google CSSS report) was assembled under Bill Clinton after the fuzzy accounting that declared a budget surplus. Granted, had we continue to underfund the military, and 9/11 never happened, and there were no natural disasters, and everything went along as it was in 1998, there would have been a budget surplus by now. Bill Clinton, looking at these numbers, declared that with this surplus, we needed to "fix Social Security first". So he assembled the Commission to find out what was the best way to do it.

The Commission looked at various models, and used these models to extropolate the long term effects of each plan given the future of the aging population as we knew it. Their conclusion was that the best way to handle it was to use half of the money from SS contributions (the contributions are split evenly between employer and employee) to pay for current SS payouts and the other half invested in individual accounts which were owned by the taxpayers. The major advantages being that this half of the money was not in government accounts where it could be stolen by politicians, that individuals were essentially forced to save 6.2% of their income on interest bearing accounts, and that existing contributions would allow payments to existing and near future beneficiaries with only slight adjustments in payments based on inflation rather than arbitrary schedules. This plan is available in a summary version from the Heritage Foundation, it is called "The 6.2% Solution". It's about 30 pages total, if memory serves, and is an easy read. Certainly easier than the CSSS report which is several hunrded pages.

So in 2001, the CSSS released it's report to then President Bush. He went on a national tour to try to sell it. But partisan politics got in the way, it was labeled "Bush's Plan", and he failed to explain how it worked or where it came from in a way people could easily understand. The Democrats, never wanting to miss an opportunity to take a shot at George, and certainly not wanting the newly seated Republican to get credit for fixing what is quite possibly the biggest and most threatening financial problem the federal government has ever seen, threw out scare propaganda about people loosing everything they owned in the stock market (let alone that people had the majority of their retirement money already privately invested in the stock and bond markets, and that the SS accounts had a federally backed stop loss provision their 401K's did not have, backed by the FDIC much like the Bear Stearnes bailout a few weeks ago), and touted it as "Bush's Plan" so it could be sunk in the media.

And so now we are discussing what to do about saving Social Security again. Except now we are 7 years further down the rabbit hole and considerably closer to the bankruptcy deadline. And yet the subject is rarely if ever brought up with any of the presidential frontrunners today. Every day that goes by makes turning this particular ship around in tighter and tighter quarters more of a challenge, and yet noone is giving the order. By the time this next election is over, someone is going to have to do it, and the price of doing it will likely cost that leader their popularity, at least in the 4 to 8 years to come. But presidents are more concerned with how they will be remembered in 4 years than they are in the long run anyway. Clinton went against this by optomisticly projecting his budget plans into an unknown future over a new administration and prematurely took credit for a surplus that never materialized without having to actually do anything, but I'll give him this: at least he got the ball rolling. It was his own party and an inarticulate president that let the air out of it, possibly to the demise of all of us. But after all, politics isn't really about what is good for the people anyway, is it?