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Dog Food.

In that (formerly?) well known scene from The Graduate a college age Dustin Hoffman is pulled over by a middle aged business type who whispers the word "Plastics," indicating that plastics (plastics manufacturing, innovation of plastics in product design, etc.) would be the growth sector in the economy. Invest in plastics if you want to get rich, kid. Perhaps a similar scene in 2005 would have the middle aged guy saying, "Dog Food." If you've been paying attention to the talk of "reforming" social security, then you must realize by now that the future could be quite bleak for the elderly. In yet another breaking of the social contract between the state and the citizenry, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Bush administration wants to finally take a shotgun to one of the key programs to come out of the Roosevelt administration's New Deal. Reform social security? More like blast it into smithereens.

The message is clear. Gone are the days when the mark of civilization was the degree to which a society cared for its most vulnerable citizens, particularly the young and the old. If you haven't set aside your own personal fortune by the time of retirement, then it is your own fault and you need to keep working (get thee down to WalMart). You should have done what Dick Cheney did. He's not going to need social security. He's self-reliant.

The funny thing is, social security is already a joke for a lot of very hard working people. They are just not going to live that long anyway. People who work in the low skill trades are particularly vulnerable. They have lower life expectancy, a much higher probability of being disabled, and if they manage to stay alive and able to work into their sixties (Bush wants you to keep working into your mid-seventies), then their skill set and the physical requirements of work are likely to make it very difficult to keep working in any event. This is working out to be quite a cruel social joke on a lot of people. Social security won't be enough to live on but you may not be able to find suitable work either. Then again, you may die long before you ever see a penny of social security.

But it's not all bad. Privatization of social security should be a boon to asset management and the larger Wall Street community. The big investment banks weren't pumping $$$ into the Bush reelection campaign for nothing. This continues a trend of opening the public coffers to select corporate pirates, made infamous by opening many areas of government (even feeding and providing logistical support for military personnel) to companies like Halliburton. As Willie Sutton reportedly said, "That's where the money is."

So don't despair. There will be winners and losers. Invest in the winners. Short the losers. Buy dog food stocks. Buy investment banks. Buy makers of portable homes. Then again, maybe you'd better not buy the investment banks. If we keep dismantling the New Deal, we may eventually find the right trigger to bring back the deeper business cycles the New Deal was designed to eliminate. This means we may finally get that depression the Grand Old Party seems so nostalgic for. Let the good times roll.