Column: Mike Pence, would-be president, has a plan to kill Social Security. It will cost you

Former Vice President Mike Pence dipped his toes into the presidential campaign waters Feb. 2 with a proposal that would mean the death of Social Security.

Pence made his remarks on stage during a conference of the National Assn. of Wholesaler-Distributors in Washington. The event wasn't open to the public, but a video and transcript was posted by American Bridge, which is affiliated with the Democratic Party.

That's when Pence unearthed the old Republican idea of privatizing Social Security wholly or partially.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, airing out a never-fulfilled GOP promise

"Give younger Americans the ability to take a portion of their Social Security withholdings and put that into a private savings account,” he proposed. "A very simple fund that could generate 2% would give the average American twice what they're going to get back on their Social Security today."

Pence didn't say outright that he advocates killing Social Security. Instead, he took the course I reported on just last week. That's the Republican and conservative habit of employing plausible-sounding jargon and economists’ gibberish to conceal their intention to hobble the program.

But make no mistake: Diverting any significant portion of Social Security taxes into private accounts would make the program unworkable, funnel untold wealth into the hands of Wall Street promoters and leave millions of families destitute.

It's amazing that Pence would air out the private-account idea now, after a year in which the stock market returned a negative 23% (inflation-adjusted, as measured by the Standard & Poor's 500 index).

It was just such a dose of reality that helped kill the same proposal when it was put forth by President George W. Bush in 2001; Bush abandoned the idea in 2005, after the stock market return for 2001 to 2005 came to negative 2%, including two years of double-digit losses.

I wrote a book at that time explaining that the Bush plan was "endangering our financial future." That's still true of private accounts.