It depends. It is not extreme comparing to the current level of employee benefits in the US, but that current level is already extremely - rather scandalously - low comparing to that in the EU.
>The US already has a large number of
> people whose retirement is principally private.
The label itself does not matter. What matters is what happened when you re-label things. I am an empirical scientist, not an economist, and I do not believe in creating things ex nihilo, by merely calling them differently. If there is a deficit in SS, you cannot bridge that deficit by renaming things or shuffling them around. You need to either (i) increase input (i.e. increase payroll tax or the ceiling to which that tax applies, or perhaps obtain better return rates from investing SS funds); or (ii) decrease output (i.e. reduce the amount of benefits or their duration by increasing the retirement age) (or both).
So if there is a deficit in SS, privatizing it will accomplish nothing, unless either increasing input or decreasing output is implemented. Which raises the question, why do we need privatization to increase input or decrease output?
The answer is quite simple. Increasing input is flatly opposed by the corporate bosses and assorted rich people, because it will increase their taxes. Decreasing output is opposed by the beneficiaries and those who are about to become beneficiaries - and since this group tends to vote in relatively great numbers, proposing that option openly is a political suicide.
This is a perfect stalemate which can only be broken by bamboozling a large segment of the electorate by re-labeling and moving things around. Privatization can accomplish that not because of the form of ownership per se, but because of the complexity of the change that will muddle up the actual outcome of the operation. In fact any change of the current system that sufficiently confuses the public will do - as long as at the end of this reshuffling the geezers will be getting less than originally promised. That is the main goal of the game.
As long as this goal of reducing SS benefits is accomplished - necessarily through hook and crook, because no sane person would vote for it - it will get the blessing of the corporate bosses because it will reduce their tax liability, give them more discretionary power over labor, and put a downward pressure on wages, as many geezers will have to re-enter the labor market to support themselves.
Corporate bosses push for privatization of SS because they feel emboldened by the success of their propaganda apparatus to sell Bush as a "common man." If they were able to accomplish that, they must be thinking that ANYTHING can be sold to the gullible US-sers, given the right marketing strategy.
It is really a no-brainer, the whole economic mumbo jumbo has been added merely to confuse the issue.
> but what happens to your airline pension if
> you decide to work out of that industry? Or, I guess more important
> lately: what happens to your airline pension EVEN IF YOU DON'T DECIDE TO
> LEAVE ...?
I guess you will be giving out smiley stickers at the local Wal-Mart super center after you retire. Or go for the American Express Dream, if you do not have recent bankruptcies.
Wojtek