Social Security: the retirement package so good, they had to make it mandatory

Here's the president of the Club for Growth on personal accounts for Social Security:

The benefits of personal accounts over the current system can be illustrated with a numerical example. Let’s take a hypothetical 25-year-old male earning $32,000 a year with average wage growth. Under the current system, he will receive $2,780 per month when he retires, or a measly -0.72 percent return on his contributions (according to the handy calculations of the Heritage Foundation). Now imagine that our hypothetical worker invests the retirement portion of his payroll taxes in a bundle of stocks and bonds, earning a modest 4.9 percent return. When he retires at the ripe age of 67, he will have an account with his name on it worth $1.1 million, or $9,546 per month, ready to be spent on that cabin in the mountains he always wanted.

So the debate over Social Security comes down to one simple question: Would you rather have $2,780 a month in your retirement or $9,546 a month?

Personal accounts have the added benefit of keeping money out of the hands of the government where, inevitably, it will be mishandled and misspent. The government has been able to live beyond its means by masking the true size of the budget deficit by using the Social Security surplus, which is converted into government securities. When the bill comes due in 2017, it's going to be a shocker.