Hmmm, a couple of things.

First, she's comparing social security to only a small under-performing interval of the stock market. 401ks are long-term investment vehicles, with losses, earnings, and contributions that are intended to span decades.

Second, she trots out the fiction of the social security "trust fund." The falsity of the "trust fund" is easy to demonstrate: take out a piece of paper and write on it

I, (your name) owe 6.2 trillion dollars to (your name).

Then go ahead and sign it. Congratulations!!! You're a trillionaire!!! Or are you? Aren't you going to have to come up with that 6.2 $trillion before you can pay it to yourself?

That's the government's problem with the trust fund. According to Reason Magazine, the trust fund is merely a filing cabinet of laser-printed IOUs from the government to itself in an office in West Virginia. From what I understand you can actually see it for yourself because the Social Security Administration gives tours. But what that filing cabinet contains literally has no more value than the piece of paper on which you just wrote, if you discount the difference in recycling value of the paper. Yet the author of the CNN piece argues as if the trust fund were a real trust fund, an actual honey pot of money that the Federal government can casually dip into if necessary whenever it needs to send out checks. Pretending the trust fund is real allows SS supporters to pretend that SS won't run out of money for another 30 years. Even GW Bush pushed this fantasy. But according to the government, the program's outlays will begin to exceed it's revenues by 2018, not 2039. Which is to say it probably would have actually occurred in 2015 given the government's track record of such predictions. But that was before the current credit crisis and recession. Due to the lower amount of contributions into the system due to the current economy, SS may cross that threshold as early as this Christmas.

Lastly, nothing in that article rebuts the argument that the SS system is a Ponzi scheme, and like all Ponzi schemes it financially unsustainable. Eventually this can will simply get too big to kick down the road anymore, and will fail. It can't be fixed. We need to replace it with a modern, sustainable system.

yours/
peter.