Nobody can pluck a heartstring like William Jefferson Clinton. Seven days before the election, the White House released a report on Women and Retirement Security, which sounded the alarm that elderly women are at serious risk for poverty and depend heavily on Social Security to fend off destitution.

Of course they depend on it – they spent the past sixty years expecting to find it waiting for them as they reached old age. Instead, those women, and their daughters and granddaughters who continue to pour money into the system, are looking at a Ponzi scheme running out of cash.

The current pay-as-you-go system has to change – it is simply insupportable given demographic trends and its house-of-cards financial management. The latest figures from the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance (OASDI) Trust Funds predict the combined Social Security and Disability Trust Funds will stay solvent until 2032, under best case economic conditions. As Naomi Lopez of the Pacific Research Institute has reported, if the economy weakens, the programs could crash into insolvency as early as 2022.

With his pledge to "Save Social Security First!", the President got the momentum for change underway, but it turns out the President is woefully fuzzy on concrete solutions. He wants to force employers to count time taken out of the workforce under the Family Medical Leave Act towards a pension, which would create a mandate on the already shrinking roster of private employers that provide pensions.

While the President conceded that forcing employers to cover time off towards a pension would be the costliest measure for private employers, he immediately proclaimed that cost "an enormous benefit to the stability of families." In other words, you’d have to be a homewrecker to be against his "modest" proposal. Still, imposing mandates is not an effective way to generate private-sector enthusiasm for providing pensions for their employees.

The president also wants to allow people to adjust the level and timing of pension benefits disbursement. This seems reasonable enough, but would impose another regulation on an already complicated system. And further complicating a system does not encourage participation. The fact is, neither of the President’s proposals change the reality that the current Social Security system leaves baby-boomer women — not to mention Generation Xers — less financially secure in their old age than today’s senior citizens.

True retirement security would mean letting people plan for themselves how to allocate their own resources. It would mean creating individual retirement accounts which would engage people in planning for their own future.

The President is right that women’s labor-force participation is shorter than men’s and our lifetime contributions therefore lower. So doesn’t it make sense that women would want to get the biggest bang out of our hard-earned dollars? Privatization wouldn’t just help women with MBAs. Recent research from the Cato Institute finds that even among low-income women with interrupted work histories, a privatized retirement system leaves them significantly better off than the old system.

Unfortunately, heartstrings and hysteria paid big dividends for the White House on election night. As for Republicans, it helps your case quite a bit if people know what you stand for. Without a clear and compelling case for partial privatization and personal freedom, Republicans will lose the debate over reforming Social Security, and we will all pay the price.

— Katherine Post