Via SLOG …  Bad as the Bush gang have been for our economy and our standard of living, things could have been worse.  Remember when they wanted to "privatize" social security?  "Privatize", being another way of saying, "Let’s give the social security trust fund to Wall Street to play with…"

In a post about the economy, the Reality-Based Community makes a very important observation:

If George W. Bush’s/John McCain’s views on Social Security of a couple of years ago had been national policy, your retirement could have shared in this meltdown.

Oh joy.  Or, more specifically…

The upshot is a state of radical uncertainty: as Paul Krugman says today, "nobody knows what will happen next."… There is a very, very long list of things that could go horribly wrong from here on out. The liquidation of Lehman is one; the possible collapse of American International Group is another. Beyond that are countless hedge funds and other financial institutions which, collectively, present significant systemic risk.

But the biggest and most obvious risk of all is the one associated with Lehman’s own debt, which is now trading at less than 35 cents on the dollar. That’s a big loss for the institutions holding it—but it also means an unknowably huge loss for anybody who wrote credit protection on Lehman Brothers at any point over the past five years. Those sellers of credit protection are staring down the barrel of billions of dollars in claims, and they’re going to have to raise that money quick by selling anything they can get their hands on—and that might well include stocks.

Those would be the stocks that were supposed to make social security more…secure.  See how deregulation works?

They’ve hated social security with a passion almost as lively as their hatred for FDR, the man who created it.  All that money that went into the trust fund from worker’s paychecks to fund their retirement was money the kings of Wall Street figured rightfully belonged to them.