What about the impact that privatizing social security will have on children whose parents die when they are still minors? Social Security isn't just for the elderly!
My own personal experience makes me notice this omission in public discussion of private accounts. My father died before I was born. My mother, orphaned when she was eight, only had a high-school education. She never made more than $25,000 a year in her entire life.
You might think that, as a child in such a household, I would have had fairly restricted educational opportunities. But after my father died in a car accident, my mother received monthly social security checks from my father's accumulated benefits. Every month, she put the check in the bank in order to save for my education. Thanks to FDR and the generosity and farsightedness of my mother, I went to Oberlin College and Yale Graduate School, and am now a professor. (I also have student loans, but they're not debilitating.)
Clearly a child in a private-account future, whose family also suffers financial hardship due to the death of a parent, will not have the same opportunities I did 20 years ago when I started college.
We must demand from every proponent of privatization an explanation as to how the new, market-dependent personal accounts will take care of children whose parents die untimely deaths.
No child left behind?