Privatize Social Security?!

Can we finally kill this terrible idea?

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2009, at 6:59 AM ET

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"We told you so" is just about the most annoying sentence one can utter. But when it comes to the debate over Social Security, this is a moment for Democrats to say: We told you so. Use your time machine to travel back four years: In his 2005 State of the Union address, delivered during a period of economic and stock-market growth, President Bush made the privatization of Social Security the centerpiece of his domestic agenda for his second term.

The grand domestic project of the Bush administration was to repeal the two major components of New Deal ideology: the regulatory apparatus of the federal government and the social contract embodied by social welfare programs—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. The effort to roll back the regulatory agencies—the SEC, EPA, OSHA—and place all faith in an unregulated market has been well-chronicled, as have been the ensuing market collapse and suffering. The effort to repeal Social Security, which is what privatization amounts to, was to have been followed by private health savings accounts.