Noam Schieber on social security privatization:

We know that the people most likely to do worse are poorer people, for the reasons laid out above. And, again, if the logic of privatization is right,*** we don't really need private accounts to accomplish this result. We could simply have the government borrow a lot of money, invest it in the stock market, and then reward a lot of rich people and punish a lot of poor people. As long as you know that the winners will mostly be in one group (i.e., affluent), and the losers will mostly be in another (i.e., poor), the government can identify them itself and basically replicate the privatized system. But, of course, when you think about it that way--as a government plan for rewarding the rich and screwing the poor--it doesn't sound like a political winner.

And as it turns, out, Bush's version isn't much of a political winner either.