To the editor:

I’d like to contribute some facts to the opinions you recently published about President Bush’s proposal to “privatize” Social Security. Recently, when I received my SSA statement showing what my benefits would be if I were of retirement age, I did a little research.

With help from a customer service representative at a local annuity company, I found that if, starting when I joined the work force, I could have invested all my FICA contributions equally divided among three popular “growth” mutual funds that I use, and their average return since 1970 continued the same from now until I reach retirement age, I could purchase a life-certain annuity that would pay me about 2.5 times the monthly benefit estimated in my SSA statement. That’s WITHOUT the equal contribution by my employer!

Put another way, I could have gotten a total of FIVE times the total return of my money, compared to what I will actually get. So, the fact that SSA has NOT allowed privatization has cost me about 80 percent of what I could have had at retirement.

Kelvin Flory,

Ottawa