Excellent column on Social Security reform, by Jay Bryant.

Some excerpts:

What would have happened, I thought, if I'd invested my social security taxes in the average blue chip Dow Industrial stock all these years, instead of sending them to the government?

...I paid a total of 6% on my $93 (earned in 1960), which equals $5.58. Since 1960, the Dow has increased by a factor of 1650.80%, meaning that if I had taken the $5.58 and bought the average Dow stock, the investment would today be worth $97.69, and the $15.84 I paid the next year on my $264 burger-flipping wages would be worth 217.77, the Dow being up 1374.82% since 1961.

...

The bottom line is that my mythical Dow-Instead-Of-Social-Security portfolio would today be worth $930,651.89.

...for a 62-year-old male in Maryland, a $930,651.89 single life annuity will return an "estimated" $5,748 per month, assuming the deal ends the day I die. That's $68,976 a year, tax-free. If I'm willing to let Mrs. Bryant collect payments after my demise, the monthly payments go down a bit (but not much), depending on how long she gets to collect.

Of course, it's all academic, since I wasn't allowed to invest any, let alone all, of my social security taxes. So I'm stuck with my lousy $1,327 a month ($15,924 a year), less than a fourth of what I could have had. And, of course, there would have been lots of ways to make a lot more than my modest hypothetical "average Dow" plan.