The AARP is vehemently against Social Security reform. Larry Kudlow points out a glaring hypocrisy of their quest against personal accounts:

Malkiel’s defense of personal accounts comes in response to disingenuous anti-stock market ads from the AARP. The ads say, “If we wanted to gamble, we’d play the slots.” In other words, the AARP believes that investing in stocks and bonds is a crap shoot. Their new slogan is “Social Insecurity.”

This campaign is flat-out hypocritical. The AARP advertises no fewer than 38 different stock and bond mutual-fund investments to their members. You can buy anything on their website from big-cap Dow stocks to emerging-market funds. If you want to “gamble,” you can even buy Argentina — through the good offices of the AARP.

Of course, the AARP gets a nice fat commission on any of these fund sales. Yet, when steering their membership away from the Bush Social Security reforms, they never cite the long-run positive stock returns discussed in the work of Burt Malkiel, University of Pennsylvania professor Jeremy Siegel, or many other experts. The disingenuousness of the AARP is shameful. What’s good for their members should be good for the rest of us.

It still amazes me that so many want to leave a broken system alone because…it might get broken. As long as the legislature has access to the funds, they are at risk. Al Gore's giant 'lockbox' concept was great in theory except for the fact that the same people who have demonstrated their inability to keep their hands off of the slush fund would also be those in charge of the lock box.

Think of personal accounts as millions of tiny lockboxes. Each one would have money inside, but nothing compared to the millions and billions that the Federal Government is accustomed to dealing with. Opening one would be hardly worth their time...which is the whole point.