They Never Learn

You would have thought that the recent craziness in the stock market, where a lot of folks lost their shirts, would have thoroughly buried the whole Bushian idea of privatizing Social Security. But you'd be underestimating the sheer blockheadedness of the American Right. In a recent interview,  SC's own wingnut Senator Jim DeMint

 talks of reviving President George W. Bush’s failed plan to partially privatize Social Security by having workers put a small percentage of the current levy in a personal savings account...But let’s review. As a Center for American Progress Action Fund report found, under a Bush-style privatization plan, a October 2008 retiree would have lost $26,000 in the market plunge. If the U.S. stock market had behaved like the Japanese market during the duration of that retiree’s work life, “a private account would have experienced sharp negative returns, losing $70,000 — an effective -3.3 percent net annual rate of return.” And this doesn’t take into account the full plunge of the stock market, which dipped below 7,000 in March 2009.

Fail? They don't know the meaning of the word. And that's not necessarily a good thing.