Social Security and the big bad bear

Will an imploding stock market kill off plans to privatize our national safety net?

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Apr 3, 2001 | These are lonely days for the fading bull market's giddy stock pushers.

Disgraced stock analysts like Mary Meeker, Abby Joseph Cohen and Henry Blodget are suffering the humiliation of having their sunny predictions about the markets thrown back in their faces. It's also unlikely that we'll see James Glassman and Kevin Hassett, coauthors of "Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market," stumping for their pie-in-the-sky guide to investing on CNBC anytime soon.

But neither NASDAQ's dizzying fall of more than 60 percent from its high just a year ago nor the Dow's teetering on the brink of full-blown bear territory has deterred President Bush from his plans to bring the wonders of stock market investing to the government's biggest program -- Social Security.

While the markets melt down -- and investors wonder why, why, why they didn't cash out last September -- the president is setting in motion his plan to privatize Social Security. Just when you thought that the country was getting its rude collective comeuppance for that extended bout of irrational exuberance, Bush is saying that what this country really needs is more of our money -- our retirement dollars -- in the market.

In late February, when the Dow hovered over 10,000, Bush told Congress that he would form a presidential commission to reform Social Security. By next fall, he promised, the group would make recommendations on how to preserve benefits of current retirees without raising taxes, while offering "personal savings accounts to younger workers who want them." In other words, workers could allocate part of their Social Security contribution to personal accounts that they could then invest in the market.

And as recently as March 19, Bush sold the idea to members of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, stressing the importance of giving younger workers the option of investing some of their Social Security dollars: "In order to make sure that there is a Social Security system around tomorrow, we've got to get a better rate of return on the money in the Social Security trust," he said. "And that means trusting people with their own money to make wise decisions as to how to get a better rate of return than the 2 percent in the Social Security trust."

Right now, a 2 percent rate of return looks downright flush compared with what the stock market is currently delivering. Could there be a weirder time to be promoting the value that the stock market could bring to Social Security dollars than when the market is suffering its most gut-wrenching decline in a decade?

Imagine that some version of privatization was already in effect, and you'd put a portion of your Social Security dollars in an index fund that tracked the S&P 500 Index, a relatively conservative investment. Over the last year you'd have watched your investment plummet almost 25 percent, with most of that hit coming in the last two months. In 2000, the S&P 500 had its worst year since 1977, posting returns of minus 9 percent.

Whoops! Too bad you didn't retire a year ago! And heaven forbid you'd hitched your golden years to a fund tracking the NASDAQ, which fell 39 percent in 2000 and has fallen almost that much already in 2001. Still, the proponents of Social Security privatization argue there's never been a better time to let the market play a bigger role.

Next Page: Is it time to buy low, sell high?

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