Your retirement has never been so uncertain, and Social Security has never been so important. Companies used to offer pension plans, guaranteeing regular monthly payments to their retired former employees. Not any more.

Today’s corporations tend to offer retirement plans based on the success of investments you made during your working years. These are “defined-contribution” retirements, the 401(k)s, in which your retirement security is based on your investment in the stock market, on luck and fortune—for better or for worse.

The forces behind the rightward shift in government would love to see Social Security look more like the 21st-century corporate retirement plan. Social Security is no longer solvent, the conservatives say. It’s time for reform. Let’s privatize it. Let’s throw the panacea of free-market capitalism at the government safety net.

Unfortunately, capitalism, by its nature, tends to leave some people on the short end of the stick.

Both corporations and the government are increasingly hostile to the American worker, with income volatility nearing all-time highs. So unless you’re excited about an America where retirement is a sink-or-swim enterprise, you should be very concerned with the future of Social Security—and the future of social welfare as a whole. Because the Grand Old Party is after something more than just “reforming” the national pension plan.

How Solvent Is It?
Pretty damn solvent. Historically, there have been enough people in the workforce supplying payroll taxes to support retirees’ benefits. The baby boomers, a massive payroll tax base, allowed Social Security to take in more than it spent. There were many years—2004 among them—when the program ran surpluses.

Unfortunately, the baby boomers are on the verge of retirement; fortunately, this comes as no surprise to the U.S. government. For all the accounting shenanigans we see in Washington (Tom Delay, I’m looking at you), the federal government has managed to accurately and honestly keep track of how old people are. Based on this information the government foresaw the threat of insolvency and planned ahead. The Social Security Administration started saving the baby boomers’ payroll surpluses in a trust fund years ago.

The enemies of Social Security like to say that the trust fund contains no money. They’re right. But it’s chock-full of the next best thing: U.S. treasury bonds.

Because it didn’t make good economic sense to horde away all those payroll surpluses, our government invested them in our future. Every single dollar the Social Security Administration received from the boomers in payroll surpluses was invested: education, roads, defense—anything the federal government provides. The government borrowed all of that money from Social Security to pay for America. In return, it not only gave us roads, schools and wars, it gave us something else—IOUs.

Those U.S. government IOUs come in the form of treasury bonds. And there’s no better investment in the world than a U.S. treasury bond. Our government is about the least likely institution in the world to default on a debt. The Social Security trust fund has about—wait for it—$1.7 trillion (yes, trillion) in these bonds. When the boomers retire, we’ll have that huge sum of money tucked away, waiting to care for them in their old age. And $1.7 trillion will last us quite a while.

According to the Social Security Administration, the program will become technically insolvent in 2017. That year, it will pay out more in benefits to retirees than it takes in from payroll taxes. We’ll begin to tap into our rainy-day trust fund. As planned, the trust fund will supplement payroll taxes, allowing the system to continue paying full benefits until it runs out in 2041. Even then, Social Security will still be able to pay more than 70 percent of benefits to all retirees.

That’s 36 years from now.

Compared with the solvency crisis in Medicare, the Social Security crisis doesn’t seem like a crisis at all. Projected over an infinite horizon, Medicare faces a $65.4 trillion deficit—compared with Social Security’s $11.1 trillion. Medicare’s insolvency date? 2004. That’s right: Medicare started spending its trust fund last year.

So why do conservatives want to change Social Security? And why do they want to do it now? Because the push to overhaul Social Security is not a pragmatic solution to an insurmountable problem, as the rhetoric of GOP politicians might have you believe. It is the logical starting point for the final salvo in a war of ideology.

Privatize This!
The private account system, the conservatives’ alternative to Social Security, has been percolating through right-wing think tanks and Republican policy-making circles for years. It would allow workers to divert a percentage of their payroll taxes into individually owned private accounts. Upon reaching retirement, your investments would be used to purchase an annuity, an account that pays its owner an allowance until death.

Diverting money into private accounts would amount to cutting payroll taxes, and less revenue from payroll taxes would mean proportional cuts to traditional Social Security benefits.

Of course, no one wants to say that they’re going to “cut” Social Security benefits. It’s much less politically dangerous to say you’re going to “index” them differently—because very few people know what that actually means.

Here’s what: Social Security benefits are indexed to wages: They rise as wages rise, thereby making sure that retirees keep up with increases in the national standard of living. Part of the privatization plan involves rearranging the program so that it is indexed to prices instead of wages. That may sound harmless, but wages grow at a much higher rate than prices.

So, over the course of a few decades under the proposed system, benefits would shrink so dramatically that private accounts would be forced to pick up more and more of the slack. At the same time, less money would be flowing into the system as more and more was diverted into private accounts. The result is deeper insolvency—a greater funding crisis. This doesn’t sound like “fixing” Social Security, does it?

Eventually—and this is no accident—the traditional Social Security system would face such a severe budget crunch that it would have to be entirely replaced by the 401(k)-like private investment system.

The phase-out will be helped along by the fact that some workers will get lucky. They’ll have great success with private accounts and happily attest to that success, adding to the political pressure aimed at eliminating the traditional system—even as millions of Americans still desperately need it.

So Long, Safety Net
Ample evidence supports the theory that the president’s plan is really about the elimination of Social Security. Consider the administration’s relationship with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank and the intellectual force behind the Bush plan. In the last four years, the Bush administration stocked the Social Security Administration with former Cato luminaries in an attempt to inject their ideological leanings into the government program.

Because the Bush administration is reluctant to formally announce the details of a “reform” plan (instead it chooses to leak bits and pieces of it to the press), it’s logical to look to privatization’s intellectual architects at Cato to fill in the blanks. And there’s no doubt about how they feel: “Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare sate,” Cato’s Stephen Moore recently told The New York Times. “If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state.”

If you’re like me and that quote gives you an overwhelming urge to shower, go for it. This will still be here when you get back.

We can speculate endlessly on the potential successes or failures of individual investors in a privatized system. But one thing is certain: There will be losers—the nature of the market guarantees that. These unlucky account-holders are the kind of people that Social Security was designed to protect. Now they’ll have lost in the market and be without a guaranteed pension.

That doesn’t strengthen the program. That defeats its purpose. We would either allow those people to grow old in poverty or be forced to create some kind of entitlement to alleviate their financial woes…Some kind of “security” program for “social” well-being. We could call it “Social Security.”

See, the Social Security system is already configured to allow for markets, risk, winners and losers because it is predicated on the nature of a free-market capitalist society. In the traditional system, even if you “lost” in your working and investing years—your “free-market” years, you would still have something for retirement—your “secure” years. That system acknowledges how individual successes and failures in the market create the problem that Social Security solves.

If we privatize it—inject the market into the system—we’re adding more of the problem to the solution. As much as deregulators and free-market conservatives would hate to hear this, the solution to problems posed by free markets is not more free markets. Privatization is paradoxical to Social Security.

Not So Keen On Keynes
The assault on Social Security is not just a threat to retirement—it threatens every single program that invests in the socioeconomic well-being of average Americans.

Since the New Deal, almost all domestic economic politics have worked with Franklin Roosevelt’s model, which is based largely on the theories of John Maynard Keynes. Keynesian economics suggests, among other things, that the government should empower labor and make sure the work force is prosperous and expanding. The resulting consumer class would pump enough money into the economy to prevent severe economic downturns like the Great Depression from happening in the future.

You could do this in any number of ways, from regulation of powerful corporations to advancement of collective bargaining to entitlement programs. Social Security is such a program, designed to keep middle- and lower-class Americans above the age of 65 from becoming destitute.

In the Keynesian age, even corporations themselves were relatively pro-labor. According to a 1970 poll cited by John Judis in The New Republic, 57 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs believed the federal government should expand corporate regulation—an astonishing statistic when compared with today’s viciously anti-regulatory corporate environment. The Keynesian paradigm was so overwhelming that even under Republican Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, entitlement programs were expanded in distinctly nonconservative ways. In a tribute to FDR’s dominance over American domestic politics, Nixon himself famously declared, “We are all Keynesians now.”

Perhaps he spoke too soon.

During the 1970s, as stagflation slowed the American economy and both Western Europe and East Asian markets started to compete fiercely in the manufacturing sector, corporations began to fight against labor to keep profits high. The burgeoning conservative movement took up the industrial sector’s fight—pushing for less regulatory protection of the middle class and more regressive supply-side tax cuts. Some aspects of the welfare state were sacrosanct, but as the movement gained strength, it found a natural enemy in Social Security—a progressive, Keynesian, pro-middle-class, enormous entitlement program.

This new paradigm represents a significant rightward shift in American politics. Liberalism once represented those attempting to expand the size and reach of New Deal programs. To be a conservative meant you wanted to maintain the New Deal’s status quo. In today’s climate, to be a liberal is to fight for the status quo in New Deal programs where conservatives are working to scale them back. Or destroy them all together.

Given this context, it’s foolish to believe that the conservatives’ plan to overhaul Social Security constitutes an attempt to “strengthen” the program—it’s not some lone, middle-class friendly initiative among a deluge of systematic GOP giveaways to the corporate elite. We can’t look at Social Security privatization as an exception to the conservative movement’s ideals. Rather, it is the flagship initiative of those ideals—shifting risk from the wealthy to the middle class, emphasizing lower corporate taxation, eliminating progressive redistribution of wealth. Social Security privatization is the ultimate triumph of individual advancement over collective good—the poster child for the conservative movement.

Don’t Repeal the New Deal
In the right-wing effort to turn a blind eye to working Americans, Social Security should be off-limits. Letting conservatives undermine the most popular entitlement in American history will only embolden them. It will give them the political capital to pass a series of regressive, pro-corporate social programs that will reverse the New Deal paradigm—a paradigm of middle-class expansion and empowerment that brought this country unprecedented political and economic dominance in the world.

Social Security works. It’s a program that government undoubtedly managed to get right. If we let the dubious ideology of the conservative movement undermine this program through fictitious mathematics and deceptive rhetoric, we do so at our own risk.