Guess we dodged a big bullet there. Thank goodness Bush didn't get away with that one too.

Here is how it worked out for Italy.

Jan. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Italy did for retirement financing what President George W. Bush couldn’t do in the U.S.: It privatized part of its social security system. The timing couldn’t have been worse.

The global market meltdown has created losses for those who agreed to shift their contributions from a government severance payment plan to private funds meant to yield higher returns. Anger is rising both at the state, which promoted the change, and money managers such as UniCredit SpA and Arca Previdenza, which stood to profit.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s administration is now considering ways to compensate as many as 1.2 million people who made the switch, giving up a fixed return for private plans linked to financial markets. It’s also letting people delay redemptions on retirement funds to avoid losses after Italy’s benchmark stock index fell 50 percent in 2008, destroying 300 billion euros ($423 billion) in wealth.

“The reform didn’t help anyone,” said Gabriele Fava, who heads the Fava & Associati law firm in Milan and writes about labor law. “Not the government, which was hoping everyone would make the switch to take the strain off its coffers, nor the workers who have not resolved the problem of needing a supplement to their social security pensions.”

Italy’s experience shows how difficult it is to solve a problem facing governments from the U.S. to Europe to Japan as populations age and the old system of taxing workers to support retirees becomes unsustainable. Bush failed to persuade Congress to let workers put a portion of their Social Security taxes into privately invested accounts as voter opposition increased.

Apologies for the double post.

This happened a few days ago too. Firefox has been burping a little lately. Anyone else having similar issues?

The usual approach.

If you want to discredit the idea of a need for a reform, suggest a reform that is not a reform, but instead is a stupid reiteration of the same.

The outcome will speak for itself.

Good thing Bush wasn't successful. What good was his plan? It was simply a deception, a plot to use the coming crisis to discredit non-government securities.

Social Security need one fix only, and that is making it voluntary again, so that younger people can refuse to participate, thus prompting a long awaited destruction of the con scheme itself.

First of all Social Security was built based on a constant growth projection but the baby boomers screwed that all up when they became retirement aged.
it is a system terribly in need of reform and people need to be more financially responsible.
Personally I would like to see social security done away with.
Everybody wants Government to save them and then government begins to infringe on our personal liberties and they tax us more to support the socialized spending. There are people getting it when they contributed NOTHING to it. Privatization is a joke! It is a convenient way for corporations to get power the government never had. We really need less government to stimulate the economy and better thought out regulations and the balls to stand by them.
The problem is our government lost sight of their place in our lives! Now they want to rule us!