Because 22,384 Progressive Blogs doing so isn't enough...

Let me sing the praises of Paul Krugman, the anti-Bobo. Actual analysis, expertise in the field in which he writes, actually writes a new column rather than filling in the blanks, and certainly hasn't gone out of the way to praise an advocate of "white eugenics".

Krugman is waging war against the right-wing mantra of the need for MASSIVE, EXTENSIVE, REVOLUTIONARY, EMERGENCY, SUPER FANTASTIC, TWICE THE TASTE-HALF THE CALORIES, BETTER THAN THE MISSIONARY POSITION, RAPTURE-INDUCING, LOW CARB, CHARMIN SOFT, social security reform. Massive reform that is completely unnecessary -- and of course, reform from the same folks that would have never wanted social security in the first place.

The National Association of Securities Dealers," The Wall Street Journal reports, "is investigating whether some brokerage houses are inappropriately pushing individuals to borrow large sums on their houses to invest in the stock market." Can we persuade the association to investigate would-be privatizers of Social Security?

For it is now apparent that the Bush administration's privatization proposal will amount to the same thing: borrow trillions, put the money in the stock market and hope.

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This would sharply increase the government's debt. Never mind, privatization advocates say: in the long run, they claim, people would make so much on personal accounts that the government could save money by cutting retirees' benefits. Financial markets won't believe this claim, as I'll explain in a minute, but let's temporarily grant the point.

Even so, if personal investment accounts were invested in Treasury bonds, this whole process would accomplish precisely nothing. The interest workers would receive on their accounts would exactly match the interest the government would have to pay on its additional debt. To compensate for the initial borrowing, the government would have to cut future benefits so much that workers would gain nothing at all.

How, then, can privatizers claim that they could secure the future of Social Security without raising taxes or reducing the incomes of future retirees? By assuming that workers would invest most of their accounts in stocks, that these investments would make a lot of money and that, in effect, the government, not the workers, would reap most of those gains, because as personal accounts grew, the government could cut benefits.

We can argue at length about whether the high stock returns such schemes assume are realistic (they aren't), but let's cut to the chase: in essence, such schemes involve having the government borrow heavily and put the money in the stock market. That's because the government would, in effect, confiscate workers' gains in their personal accounts by cutting those workers' benefits.

There is more. Go read.