paul o'neill--former bush administration secretary of the treasury--is an interesting guy  who's proposing an intriguing alternative to social security as we know it. 

instead of trying to fix the existing program by throwing trillions of dollars at it with no guarantee of success, o'neill suggests we create a savings account for every us citizen--funding it with an initial deposit of $2000 on the date of birth.  an additional $2000 would be added on each subsequent birthday til the child reaches 18. 

assuming a 6% annual interest rate —according to o'neill,  the worst return for a 25-year investor in the stock market from 1929 before the crash to 2004 was an average of 6% a year--every us citizen would have  $65,520 in the bank at age 18.

o'neill says without any additional contributions, the account would be worth $1,013,326 (using that same 6% interest rate) 47 years later on the owner's 65th birthday.

as he explains it..."pre-funding" for of old age resolves the long-term financing problem for both Social Security and Medicare, allowing for the gradual replacement of programs like Supplemental Security Income and Medicaid and food stamps and housing aid for those over age 65. To make this work, the savings account money would need to be invested — my suggestion would be through so-called index funds. The administrative costs would be practically nothing because there's no need for a huge separate tax collection bureaucracy; the money would come from the general revenues of the U.S. government."

unlike even bush's 'ownership' fix, 100% of these savings would be owned by the individual.  every person born after the plan went into effect would have an account; those already alive would grandfather out social security.

more importantly, o'neill's plan would provide equal coverage for every american unlike social security which doesn't provide equal coverage to dependents such as stay-at-home moms or dads. in short, it would provide an everyone fortunate enuff to be born in the us with one more very substantial birthright.

can we afford to do something like this? according to o'neill, we cant afford not to. :

"If we began to do this now, the first-year cost would be $8 billion; that is $2,000 times the roughly 4 million children born each year. The second year would cost $16 billion and so on until we were contributing $2,000 per year to a savings account for every child from birth until age 18. When fully implemented, the cost would be $144 billion per year. To put this $144 billion per year into context, this year's combined spending for Social Security and Medicare will exceed $750 billion.

My answer is, in a federal budget of more than $2 trillion, we can certainly afford it. In an economy that will be upward of $12 trillion this year, we can afford it. By the time this plan was fully implemented, we would be living in an economy of $20 trillion. We can afford it."