Want clarity on Social Security crisis? Propose nationalizing private pensions and IRAs

If you’ve had any false hope there is real cash in the Social Security Trust Fund, consider the news out of Europe: Several governments are nationalizing private pensions. If that alarms you, ask yourself why.

You wouldn’t want the U.S. government nationalizing your private pension or IRA, even with a promise to pay it back, because you’d understand that if serious people were confident the government could pay it back, the government would borrow the money from those serious people.

In America, the same has been true of Social Security for decades. Congress has told us it wasn’t touching the Social Security Trust Fund, when in fact it was siphoning every penny that wasn’t being spent on current retirees, spending the free money on everything else and leaving us with worthless IOU notes.

Why us? The question the Poles and Hungarians are asking right now is, Why would you borrow this from us if you could borrow it from someone else?

We Americans should have been asking this question much more forcefully for 40 years. The case for partial privatization of Social Security just got stronger.

Frank Warner

Comments

[Neo]

Since private pensions are rare in Europe, there is much of a group to fight these measures there, but here in the US, except for government employees, all pensions are private.

Anybody stupid enough to propose such a measure in the US, would end up in the same landfill with John P. Wheeler III.

[George]

Scared of the government taking your money? That's exactly how our political class felt when George W. Bush promoted privatization of Social Security. They were scared that working citizens would be taking "their" money.

It has come down to class warfare between working Americans and the American political class. For the future of America, I hope that the working Americans win.