In Washington, D.C. in February, at the Summit on Women and Social Security Reform, it was announced that privatization of any part of Social Security is akin to robbing women in broad daylight. This could not be further from the truth. Today's Social Security is a sham that shortchanges women consistently, and any change toward better accounting and investments cannot be bad news.

Speakers at the Summit, organized by the Women and Social Security Project, repeatedly dismissed the idea that the impending bankruptcy of Social Security—no later than 2042 by their experts' accounting—should be cause for immediate concern and serious reform. Instead, they urged that Social Security be further supported and even expanded by increasing the number of people eligible and increasing the average benefit. The reasoning behind this appears to be: since today's Social Security fails to reasonably provide a retirement income, more Social Security must be what is needed. Clearly, this is not a workable solution.

Women are severely shortchanged not by the mere numbers that Social Security pays out, but rather by the whole structure. Social Security pays out to retirees based on worker status, with provisions for those who were the spouses of wage earners.

Women are almost uniformly the people who rely on Social Security the longest, due to longer average life expectancies. Further, due to life choices that usually involve time out of the workplace due to childbearing, women tend to spend less of their lives in the workforce.

Social Security really only pays off for women if they marry, and if they either don't work at all or work at a job that earns more than 32 percent of their husband's income. If they don't make the right decisions, they will be in poverty for what are supposed to be their golden years. According to a Cato Institute study, the poverty rate for elderly women is twice that of elderly men.

Because the funds are never actually saved for tomorrow's retirees, but instead paid out to today's, there is little hope that today's workers will ever see Social Security from the federal government. The ever-increasing number of people dependent on Social Security for their retirement income has finally taxed the ability of the current workers to support retirees while supporting themselves.

Social Security is not going bankrupt because we don't care about women or the poor, but because it could never work as intended. Privatizing retirement savings and allowing workers to divert a portion of their payroll taxes into private retirement accounts can remedy these unintended consequences. Privatization would mean current workers could be saving for their own retirement, rather than hoping that tomorrow's workers would be able to continue the government enforced generosity of today's Social Security. The expected returns for individual retirement accounts, even at a contribution rate of only 10 percent, far outstrip the benefits one might “earn” from Social Security.

The recommendations put forth in the Summit on Women and Social Security Reform demonstrate once again the foolishness of those who suggest that privatization will hurt our poor. To further claim that women will be the group at highest risk reveals just how deep the ignorance runs. It is today's Social Security that puts women into poverty, and it is tomorrow's privatization that will allow us, in our old age, to buy gourmet steak instead of ground beef. The only robbers here are those who seek to increase and extend Social Security as it exists today.