payroll deductions, then get money back after you retire. But Social Security in fact is a complex social program. By design, Social Security involves massive subsidies from the next generation of retirees to this one, from single workers to married couples, from two-earner couples to one-earner couples, from high-income earners to low, from the able-bodied to the disabled, and from those who die early to those who die late. A mandated savings and investment plan can't do what Social Security does today. Rather than redistributing benefits in intentional and socially conscious ways, a personal-investment plan could raise or lower people's benefits based on such factors as investment ability, luck and timing. What happens to the Social Security guarantee if some investors do vastly better than others – or if the stock market collapses? And launching a new program would create a massive transition problem: If current workers started contributing into individual accounts, who would pay for the benefits of current retirees? That amount, annually, is considerably more than the nation's defense budget – about $362 billion in 1997. Supporters of privatization, however, argue that public confidence in Social Security has eroded so far that the only way to restore workers' faith in the system is to give them control. They say privatization alone can strengthen the safety net and restore the long-term solvency of the system without increasing taxes. Effect on the Budget Often ignored in the debate is the inevitable effect that the huge increase in payouts to retiring Boomers will have on the federal budget. That's because, in some ways, the Social Security Trust Fund is a fiction. It technically holds government bonds, but – as a way of disguising the size of the federal deficit – the government doesn't count those bonds as debt. So in about 15 years, when the trust fund starts turning in its bonds for cash to pay benefit...
