IT’S GOING TO take political courage — and lots of it — to get politicians to deal with Social Security reform. That’s why it’s not going to happen anytime soon, if ever.

The latest attempt to deal with the coming fiscal crisis makes about as much sense as including a regular investment in MassMillions as part of your retirement plan. Seven months ago, President George W. Bush charged a 16-member commission with the task of devising a plan that would allow workers to invest part of their Social Security taxes in the stock market. The idea was to generate greater investment returns for individual retirees than those yielded by government bonds — where Social Security funds are currently invested. The commission released its final report on Monday. (You can read its executive summary online at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/articles/ssfinaldraft.htm.) Anyone with a passing knowledge of personal finance will be shocked by the panel’s recommendations.

The 16-member group, co-chaired by former New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and newly named AOL Time Warner chief executive Richard D. Parsons, couldn’t agree on one idea for investing Social Security taxes in the stock market, so they gave the president and the public three to chew on for the next seven months or so.

The only fact that matters about each plan is that they all depend on workers making additional voluntary contributions — above and beyond their Social Security tax — to government-managed "personal retirement accounts," as the report calls them. (The government would match the contribution — to the tune of about $40 billion a year.) Why is this bad? Well, workers already have the ability to invest their own money in the stock market. And they don’t need to hand over any more of their paycheck to the United States government to do so. Anyone can open a Dividend Reinvestment Plan (commonly known as a DRiP) and invest in stocks for as little as $10 a month. Trouble is, many people don’t even know such an investment option exists.

And here is the nub of the Social Security problem. Generally speaking, Americans — who don’t know enough about personal finance to keep themselves out of crushing credit-card debt, much less plan for their retirements — expect too much of the program. We’ve lost sight of Social Security’s original mission. Created at the height of the Great Depression, in 1935, the program was intended as a safety net. It was put in place to ensure that every taxpayer would receive something upon retirement and that no one would be left destitute. Now Americans look at the money they pay into the system — about 6.2 percent of their wages — and think their benefits should support a leisurely retirement. (Which is a concept of living that didn’t even exist in 1935.) President Bush has done nothing to dissuade Americans from embracing these lofty expectations. Instead, he’s encouraged them. As the executive summary of the 165-page report recounts, during one of Bush’s campaign speeches on Social Security, he declared: "Ownership in our society should not be an exclusive club. Independence should not be a gated community. Everyone should be a part owner in the American dream."

Since when has it been Social Security’s responsibility to make retirees financially independent? Never. The program is a safety net, pure and simple. The commission’s complaint that taxpayers cannot pass along their benefits as an "inheritance" is disingenuous. Social Security is also a disability and life-insurance program. Insurance is a hedge: you pay for a policy that will take care of your loved ones in the event of a catastrophe. If the catastrophe never happens, you don’t get your money back.