But if we had privatized, prospective retirees would be totally reliant on the stock market. And look what’s happened to the market. Comparing stock values now to what they were ten years ago adjusted for inflation, the S&P 500 has risen a little over 1 percent a year. Treasury bonds have done better. Go back nine years, and there’s been no gain at all. Go back eight years and market has been off an average of 1.4 percent a year.

"Totally reliant??" The man either has no clue what he's talking about, or is simply lying and hoping his audience is clueless. Given the website, that's likely.

It's not like Bush was going to retroactively privatize Social Security, or that all of the program was going to be privatized. Retirement accounts, amounting to a tiny fraction of the overall payroll tax cut, would have been phased in over several years. Details here.

Reich chose the time brackets on his analysis very carefully, especially that "eight year" one. You can look at the graphs and see what happens if you extend it out a bit.

He hopes to God nobody in my age group ever works out what their nest egg would be worth today if they'd been putting their payroll taxes into the stock market starting twenty, thirty, or forty years ago.