"President Clinton is 'leaning' toward endorsing plans that would invest some Social Security taxes in the financial markets, but ... the While House hasn't decided who should control market investments: the government or individual taxpayers. Mr. Sperling called that 'the single most contentious issue' on Social Security faced by Mr. Clinton and Congress....
"Organized labor and many liberal Democrats favor government investment because the proceeds could be used to bolster the current system of guaranteed payments. However, critics argue that the government would wind up owning a big stake in the nation's publicly traded companies and face vexing conflicts of interest.... Many Republican lawmakers and Democrats favor individual investment accounts.... Critics, however argue that taxpayers would become too dependent on the vagaries of the markets. They also contend many aren't sophisticated enough to make informed financial decisions."
There's no question that the SS "emergency" facing us has been cooked up by Wall St. as a way to get its hooks deeper into Middle America's retirement funds. But I don't recall that there has been any discussion on this list of the possible *positive* potential of SS equitization -- i.e., incremental socialization of the economy.
Twenty years ago, Peter Drucker wrote a hysterical (in every sense of the word) book called _The Unseen Revolution : How Pension Fund Socialism Came to America_. Maybe the equitization of Social Security could make that revolution *really* happen. I know it's a long shot but seems worth considering. Carl Remick