Why fix something that isn't broke.
If SS revenue generation is moved to income taxes, it can then be called a 'tax', and in all likelyhood result in the elimination of SS.
Here's a little gem that Krugman made me aware of. With the increase in administrative fees from the current 1% to 20%+ for a privatized system, the 'reform' will never yield better returns for stakeholders than the current system.
Couple of tidbits from Krugmans latest column:
"Decades of conservative marketing have convinced Americans that government programs always create bloated bureaucracies, while the private sector is always lean and efficient. But when it comes to retirement security, the opposite is true. More than 99 percent of Social Security's revenues go toward benefits, and less than 1 percent for overhead. In Chile's system, management fees are around 20 times as high. And that's a typical number for privatized systems."
. . .
"A reasonable prediction for the real rate of return on personal accounts in the U.S. is 4 percent or less. If we introduce a system with British-level management fees, net returns to workers will be reduced by more than a quarter. Add in deep cuts in guaranteed benefits and a big increase in risk, and we're looking at a "reform" that hurts everyone except the investment industry."
. . .
"So the Bush administration wants to scrap a retirement system that works, and can be made financially sound for generations to come with modest reforms. Instead, it wants to buy into failure, emulating systems that, when tried elsewhere, have neither saved money nor protected the elderly from poverty."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/17/opinion/17krugman.html?oref=login&hp