Romney endorses partially privatizing Social Security through individual investment accounts even though, as he acknowledges, "The 2008 stock market collapse is proof … that we can't always count on positive returns from these investments."

He says he prefers that private accounts be added to, not carved out of, Social Security, but doesn't explain how that would help Social Security's finances.

The crash, Romney maintains, "is not, as some critics claim, proof of the folly and danger of individual accounts." Rather, it's evidence that a privatized system would have to be "phased in over time" so that market volatility doesn't "endanger a secure retirement."

( Gecko assumes everybody would be able to commit tax evasion crimes on their investments like he does )

Yet phasing in privatization wouldn't protect account holders from a sharp downturn — the crash of 2008 would have stripped nearly 60% from retirement investors' stock portfolios whether they had built up their nest eggs by "phasing in" or all at once. If you'd been about to retire on that hoard, your plans got changed in a hurry.

The real privatization theorist on the Romney team is Ryan, who in 2005 cosponsored the "Social Security Personal Savings Guarantee and Prosperity Act" with Sen. John E. Sununu (R-N.H.). Their proposal was remarkable not merely for its rosily imagined post-privatized world, but for how much it prefigured Ryan's later "reform" of Medicare. Though it purported to solve the deficit issues of both Social Security and the federal government, the plan in fact would have exploded the deficit.

The Social Security plan would have turned over management of Americans' retirement assets to private firms, just as the Medicare plan bows to private health insurers.

The Social Security proposal would have awarded management of roughly half the program's annual inflow to Wall Street brokers and bankers, who would have been reaping fees and commissions on a torrent of about $275 billion a year to start.

The government would encourage maximum participation by guaranteeing that no matter what happened to their money in the investment markets, no one would end up with less than they would have received from conventional Social Security. Any shortfall would be made up from the federal budget.

( AKA: Wall St Gain (no risk), taxpayers take all the risk )

The CBPP concluded that what the sponsors presented as "a proverbial 'free lunch'" was in fact a budget-busting hand-over to private enterprise masquerading as en lement reform.

Seven more years of relentless conservative slanders about Social Security's future may have numbed the public into accepting some change in the program, no matter how unwise. The Washington Post, in an editorial rebuking Biden for his pledge, repeated a lot of the malarkey as if it were gospel.

Social Security is "going broke," the Post said. (Not remotely true.) It suggested that the program could be fixed with a "tweak" to cost-of-living formula for recipients, saying this would do "no harm to the safety net." In fact, the "tweak" would pare three-tenths of a percent from the inflation adjustment per year, cutting benefits increasingly and relentlessly over time — the very definition of an attack on the safety net.

These sorts of "tweaks" play into the Ryanites' hands. "When you cut Social Security you're encouraging privatization, because people have to go to the private market to make it up," observes Eric Kingson, co-director of the advocacy group Social Security Works.

That's the fearsome thing about the unfolding election: If you're not vigilant, you may end up with a privatized Social Security before you know what's happened.

http://mobile.latimes.com/p.p?m=b&a=...%3D0%26DPL%3D3

So, the entire "SS is broke LIE" and so we must "privatize SS" is nothing but a smokescreen for handing $100Bs in fees to Wall st EVERY YEAR.

If the private investments crater (as surely it will as the guaranteed, inevitable bubbles inflated by Wall St will prodcue), then taxpayers will guarantee SS retirees the standard SS pension as if they hadn't gotten into the casino at all.

The SS privatization is a huge difference between Dems and Repugs. The two parties are dramatically, FALSLEY EQUIVALENT in major policy areas.