MORE PROOF THAT NO ONE REALLY READS THE CORNER: "Personal accounts are a sweetner/smokescreen necessary to do what really needs to be done, which is reduce benefits via price indexation (or increasing the retirement age). In an ideal world, policymakers could just reduce benefits without resorting to such tactics, but democracy is messy and we let too many people vote and so such tactics have to be adopted from time to time to get the right policy..."
--an alledged correspondent of Ramesh Ponnuru's on Social Security privatization; emphasis mine

Good thing for them (and the money managers who will grow rich at taxpayers' expense under this scheme) that no one's paying attention.