We dodged that bullet!

I recently I heard a progressive pundit note that it sure is a good thing that Bush and his corporate pimps were unsuccessful in ramming through their brilliant plan to “privatize” our Social Security system. Can you imagine what it would have been like if a significant portion of the Social Security system had been invested in the stock market and other such volatile investments when the current crash occurred? It’s horrendous enough that millions have lost thousands of dollars in their 401k plans, but if SS had been included, the disaster would have been really heart -breaking. I went back and read some of the articles that were written in 2004, which were very enlightening. For instance consider this excerpt from this terrific informative piece written in December 2004:

Privatization advocates like to stress the appeal of "individual choice" and "personal control," while assuming in their forecasts that everyone's accounts will match the overall performance of the stock market. But studies by Yale economist Robert J. Shiller and others have demonstrated that individual investors are far more likely to do worse than the market generally, even excluding the cost of commissions and administrative expenses. Indeed, research by Princeton University economist Burton Malkiel found that even professional money managers over time significantly underperformed indexes of the entire market.
Moreover, a number of surveys show that most people lack the knowledge to make even basic decisions about investing. For example, a Securities and Exchange Commission report synthesizing surveys of investors found that only 14 percent knew the difference between a growth stock and an income stock, and just 38 percent understood that when interest rates rise, bond prices go down. Almost half of all investors believed incorrectly that diversification guarantees that their portfolio won't suffer if the market drops and 40 percent thought that a mutual fund's operating costs have no impact on the returns they receive.
While predictions vary significantly about how investment markets will perform in the decades ahead, it's safe to say that any growth in individual accounts under privatization will be significantly lower than what the overall markets achieve.

See, it would have been bad enough even without the crash.

Whatever you may think of Barrack, thank God, fate, karma or whatever that Obama is not Bush! How did we survive that eight years of illegitimate governance anyway?

~ tom