Social Security is going to be privatized; I'd bet my retirement on it. The only things they're waiting for are:

• The next session of Congress to come to order
• A relatively unassailable marketing plan to sell it to economic moderates (according to the Washington Post, they'll be using the same strategy they used to sell the war)
• An actual plan to write into the bill

The way you can tell the fix is in is that "news" organizations like CNN are no longer even pretending that there isn't consensus on this issue:

In fact, Social Security is not going broke at all. It's not going anywhere.

We don't know what will happen to Social Security if no changes are made, because the relative viability of Social Security depends on future economic conditions. What we have now are projections of where Social Security will be based on projections of where the economy will be. The Social Security trustees have prepared three such 75-year projections, the middle (and most generally accepted) one has GDP growing at an annual rate of 1.8%, less than the current rate of growth. Under this projection, Social Security will no longer be able to pay out the current level of benefits in 2042 -- but at that point it will still be able to pay 81% of the current level. This is what people like Lindsay Graham and George Bush call "going broke." The more optimistic projection shows GDP growing at 2.6%, in which case Social Security never drops below the current benefit levels.

Let me repeat that. If the economy grows at 2.6% annually, Social Security will be just fine for as long as we can see. In fact, you can take that number down to 2.2% and still be perfectly OK.

Now. The privitization scheme being proposed by the White House would require a rate of return of 6-7% to make the whole thing work at the same level as the current program without costing the government trillions of dollars (which, it appears, is a loss they've decided to just write off anyway). The question for everyone to consider before deciding whether or not this is good idea is as follows: Can we ever expect a 6-7% return on investments for these private accounts if GDP is only growing at a rate of 1.8%? Would such returns require GDP growth of at least, say, 2.2%, in which case Social Security is just fine and we have no need to "save" it?

The problem for those of us on the rational side of this debate is that we don't have a good soundbite message (familiar problem, yes?). "That money's yours!" they say, "You should decide what to do with it!" Except, it's not. Social Security is specifically not a savings account. The money you pay into the system is turned around immediately for current beneficiaries; the money they paid in went to recipients 20, 30 and 40 years ago. Social Security is a safety net. That is, if you screw up your retirement money, or if you get screwed out of your retirement money by an underperforming market or some con man, we will make sure you're OK. It is an entitlement program.

The best way that I can see to get around this is for Democrats to start talking quickly and loudly about means testing and raising the retirement age. There's already a graduated system of retirement ages -- I pretty sure, though not positive, that I won't be able to retire until I'm 70 -- but we need to push it further.