Privatizing Social Security

It's no secret that liberals recoil at the idea of privatizing Social Security.  Their primary argument is that it's too desert your retirement funds to the whims of the stock market. In this opinion piece, Clive Crook makes the argument that liberals should embrace privatization as a means to address the growing inequality in the economy.

Although I'm confident that this will have no truck with liberals, he raises an interesting point.  The rich are getting richer largely because of their exposure to capital while the rest of the population relies largely on Social Security for their retirement and has much less capital in their portfolio. One remedy for this would be to re-orient Social Security towards market-based assets instead of government debt.

Again, I doubt any liberal will be moved by this argument. They have an inexplicable attachment to Social Security. Yes, they say it's because of the risk, but their reactions to modifying Social Security are disproportionate to their criticisms of any modifications.

For example, if Republicans gave people the option of putting part of their Social Security taxes into private accounts, it would be a non-starter. They wouldn't calmly discuss why that's a bad idea, but would quickly dismiss it (see the Ryan-Biden VP debate). Why? Exposure to risk is limited, and on top of that, people have a choice to participate or not.  No one has to lose. If anyone has an idea as to what accounts for this mismatch, I'd love to hear it.

My tentative proposal which I'm confident will have no impact on the debate would be to re-engineer Social Security as more of an insurance program.  Instead of paying into an account, your payments to Social Security would be based on how much you save. There could be a list of options (Life Stage funds, for example, and US bonds), but the more you save, the less you pay to Social Security.  Then, when retirement comes, Social Security would guarantee a certain level of income (including proceeds from investments). That way, everyone's covered for the risk, but it's likely that it won't cost the government much at all.