Another crackpot letter to the editor in the making

Editor:

As the country rushes into the era of hope, change and runaway spending it's useful to look back at how it might have been. Twenty years ago Reagan with help from the Democrat party passed a Social Security reform bill to save the program. Reagan conveniently forgot his free market values and signed the reform at the time. But instead of investing the extra social security tax we had to pay, the government spent it all. Just think if that extra money had been invested say in home mortgages. Sure some of it would have been lost with the housing bubble bursting but that is better than all of the money gone being spent by the government. But true hope and change may be on the way. After initially, poohpooing George Bush's ideas on saving Social Security by investing the money in the stock market, the Democrats have come around and started doing just that with the recent purchases of GM, Chrysler and bank stocks. Capitalizing on this momentum there is a second way we can help save Social Security. The government can take the returns on investments from the Social Security trust funds in education and infrastructure and put that money back into the trust funds so it can be invested again or used to pay recipients like any normal pension fund would do.