The Onion, The Blade AND Social Insecurity....

[MsTryska]

interesting article from the Motley Fool:


"A while back, a story in The Onion detailed the Bush administration's plan to let Americans bet their retirement savings on their favorite sports teams. The Onion, of course, is not a real news source, but the truth hidden in that hilarious nugget was hard to deny: Most Americans are woefully ill-equipped to make intelligent investing decisions, and a nightmarishly shortsighted Social Security privatization could very well wind up letting people make investments that were no better than betting that their beloved Vikings would play in the Super Bowl. (Always a very bad bet, by the way. And I'm a Vikings fan.)

The debate over privatization of Social Security has faded from the public scene over the past couple of months. For the sake of this argument, I'm going to skip over the many red herrings in the rhetoric, the foremost being that Social Security is a national crisis now. By reliable accounts, its impending insolvency is a lot farther off than, say, the day of reckoning for the plain old budget deficit, so those who are truly terrorized by monster debt would be better off stumping for reform on that sleeping giant.

Assuming that Social Security can use an overhaul anyway (I say "Why not?") and that privatization is going to be part of the debate (it will), I want to get back to a couple of key issues with any privatization plan, since they're so well illustrated by the cautionary tale from Ohio.

Many people claim -- not without cause -- that government is a terrible entity when it comes to efficient deployment of capital. I submit that there's a creature of far greater inefficiency, and that is the government-private hybrid. If you want a monster with all of the greed, all of the inefficiency, and twice the corruption, then go ahead and put government and private industry in a warm, moist, dark room, and see what grows."



http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2005/commentary05061707.htm?source=mppromo