TUESDAY, JULY 16, 2002 — Remember the 2000 presidential campaign? That’s when the big question involved which candidate had the better Social Security plan. My eyes glazed over at that one. Texas governor George W. Bush won the election — with an assist from the folks who work here. But Bush hasn’t been able to move his Social Security plan forward.

And thank goodness. Bush’s "innovative" and "bold" Social Security plan involved giving more Americans the opportunity to invest their Social Security funds directly in the market through individual investment accounts. Why shouldn’t all Americans be afforded the same opportunities that private investors have, Bush’s partisans argued. Of course, this all sounded great back when the Dow was up around 11,000 and the Standard & Poor’s Index hovered near 1500. That’s a far cry from where it is now. The Dow has fallen to 8500, while the S&P, now near 910, has lost almost 33 percent of its value.

Some commentators, such as Jonathan Chait of the New Republic, criticized Bush’s plan from the get-go. The not-for-profit Concord Coalition identified the central weakness in Bush’s plan early on, finding that it "relies too heavily on projected investment returns from new voluntary retirement accounts." The large number of Americans now bemoaning the slide in their own private retirement accounts demonstrates that Bush’s plan would in fact have impoverished thousands, if not millions, of Americans.

Thomas Bray, a columnist with OpinionJournal, takes the obvious — that the movement to privatize Social Security is dead — and attempts to spin it into a triumph of counterintuitive logic, arguing that, since the current Social Security system is as poorly accounted for as WorldCom, it might as well be privatized.

Sure, there’s a kernel of substance to Bray’s point. The foundations of Social Security were unsound several years ago, and they remain so today. By 2030, the number of people on Social Security will double, but the working Americans supporting those individuals will grow by only 15 percent. This means trouble for Social Security.

But just because Social Security may go bankrupt in 2030 doesn’t mean we need to ruin it today through privatization, as Bray seems to be suggesting. Bray cannot spin his way out of the fact that if Social Security, which is intended to serve as insurance or an income floor for Americans, had been privatized, then many more people would be completely broke today.