Our Wobbly Retirement Reality

"Social Security's current annual surpluses of tax income over expenditures will begin to decline in 2011 and then turn into rapidly growing deficits as the baby boom generation retires," the report said.

Growing annual deficits are projected to exhaust Social Security reserves in 2041.

What President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1935 when he signed the Social Security Act is still true today:

"The civilization of the past 100 years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last."

Who among us has job security?

There are fewer companies with pension plans.

Who among us isn't watching the retirement returns of the past several years being wiped out? What if you didn't have another five or 10 years to wait for a market recovery?

Many Americans are so deeply in debt that they can't save for retirement. Heck, an increasing number of people can't make their next car payment.

Bush's drive to privatize Social Security was part of his ownership society theory.

"I think the best way to make sure that people have got real assets in the Social Security system, not just IOUs in a file cabinet, is to let younger workers take some of their own money, if they so choose," Bush said about privatizing Social Security.

That is part of Bush's economic legacy -- selfishness. Social Security was never intended to be a bank account in which you deposit money and expect it back, along with a hefty return.

Roosevelt understood that the government -- we the people -- needed to establish a net that was in place for times like what we're going through now.