When President John F. Kennedy said Americans would be the first to walk on the moon, incompetent people said it could not be done. NASA's technology lagged years behind Russia's and the Russians never did put a man on the moon. But Neil Armstrong's one small step made the dream reality. When it comes to visionary social policy, beware of those incompetent people who would reject a great plan simply because it means doing something for the first time.
             Take the farsighted idea of transforming our troubled Social Security system into a system of personal accounts. Conservative estimates show that workers who invested their payroll taxes in personal accounts would get 3 to 5 times more retirement income than Social Security provides (http://www.socialsecurity.org/pubs/articles/dao-12-02-98.html).
             The Cato Institute has a long history of seeking alternatives to the current Social Security system. Since
             1979 the Cato Institute has published more than 40 books, articles, and reports outlining the program's problems and crafting innovative policy solutions. Founded in 1977, the Cato Institute is a nonpartisan public policy research foundation headquartered in Washington D.C. The Institute is named for Cato's Letters, libertarian pamphlets that helped lay the philosophical foundation for the American Revolution (http://www.cato.org/about/about.html). The Cato experts examine the problems facing our current system, the methods that can be used to move towards a system of personal retirement accounts, and the effects that a new system would have on American workers (http://www.socialsecurity.org/about/about.html). On August 14, 1995 the Cato Institute launched its Project on Social Security Privatization, the largest undertaking in the organization's history. The objective of the project is to formulate a viable blueprint for privatizing the Social Security system. Rather than paying taxes into a...