If you're a regular you will have realized that I didn't post nearly as much as normal this past week. Sorry, but I spent the week covering for a guy who went on vacation. His job is much more time consuming and stressful than my normal job usually is.

That said, The Heritage Foundation's Alfredo Goyburu wrote a good op-ed piece in today's San Diego Union-Tribune on Social Security reform/partial privatization/private accounts.

Among the interesting facts:

The Standard & Poor's 500, the index that measures the stock prices of large companies, has gained every 20-year period since it began in 1926. It even climbed 1.1 percent through the heart of the Great Depression -- 1929 to 1938. The short-term hiccups -- even the 25 calendar years in which the S&P fell, including the six when it fell more than 20 percent -- are more than outweighed by the market's overall upward climb.

The S&P has gone up for the year 51 times since it first began. It has averaged a 7 percent annual gain over the last 75 years, and it never has had a 30-year period in which it did not gain at least 4.4 percent.

In fact, seven 30-year periods since that time had rates of return of more than 9 percent.

Of course, critics of privatization like to point out that Social Security is a welfare program. A safety net. But it's a safety net that is broken -- and Democratic demagoguery won't fix it.