From the Feb. 3 Business Week commentary by Peter Coy, "Looking For Growth In All The Wrong Places":

Many advocates of privatizing Social Security have bigger ideas in mind than just fixing the system's financing. Their goal is to force households to save more for retirement and thus raise the personal-savings rate. ... They argue that juicing up savings would make the U.S. a richer nation in the 21^st century. ...

But it's not clear that stronger economic growth would result from the reforms that are being proposed. ... Most workers who want to keep spending will be able to defeat efforts to make them save more through Social Security. ... What's more, even if the government could force the personal-savings rate upward, some economists question whether it would truly make the economy grow faster.

In any case, the benefits of forced savings might not be worth the pain. Last spring, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office considered the effectiveness of a different means of increasing national savings--that is, cutting the federal budget deficit. The CBO analyzed two scenarios. ... It concluded that real GNP per capita in 2030 would be just 2% lower under the rising-debt scenario than with a balanced budget.

Some contrarian economists argue that forcing up savings is likely to slow the economy, depressing investment rather than sparking it. "You need to stimulate the investment decision," says University of Texas economist James K. Galbraith, a Keynesian. He would rather stimulate growth by cutting interest rates. Incomes would rise faster than consumption, and the widening differential between the two would be the savings that fund new investment.