A solution that is worse than the problem

President Bush recently concluded a post-State of the Union five state tour to promote his plan to privatize Social Security. An MSNBC.com article detailing the tour's first stop noted that Bush "admits his plan does not fix Social Security."

The President would almost certainly refute this assertion. However, the article is correct in that the Bush plan calls for actually cutting Social Security benefits. This hardly seems like a fix by any definition of which Rock the Vote is aware.

Proponents of the plan would be quick to retort that in exchange for reduced traditional Social Security benefits, privatized personal accounts will be available to supplement.

This sounds good in theory. The stock market gets great returns, right? Of course it does.

Unless the stock market crashes. But, how often does that happen? We haven’t had a recession in three years!

Or unless you make a bad investment. But, that would never happen to us - we have learned a lot from Giovanni Ribisi in "Boiler Room" and Michael Douglas in "Wall Street."

The point is personal accounts do sound sexy at first. But Franklin Roosevelt was not aiming for sex appeal, he was going for a stable safety net for retirement - something a private accounts plan does not provide.

But wait, it gets worse. Private accounts will sink the nation into even deeper debt. Vice President Cheney even admitted to Fox News that the transition costs to the new plan would cost trillions during its first decade – this despite all that “fuzzy math” we warned you about....

And that does not even sound good in theory. Deficit spending is not sexy.