In case you missed it, President Bush continues to press ahead with his idea of letting people invest part of their Social Security contributions in the stock market. In his State of the Union address, he include d the line, “We must make Social Security financially stable and allow personal retirement accounts for younger workers who choose them.”

And you may not have noticed that House Speaker Richard Gephardt, in the Democratic response, said, “Our values call for protecting Social Security, and not gambling it away on the stock market.”

Quite a brisk difference of opinion amid the evening’s show of amity and bipartisanship. It’s an old issue, but something new has been added. Neither man mentioned the Enron collapse, but it was on most minds as a searing picture along. Thousands of Enron employees and other Enron investors lost their shirts by relying on false optimism and phony promises. The president himself was outraged over the losses, including $8,000 by his own mother-in-law.

The lesson is that the stock market is a gambling game. It can go up, but it can go down.

It is no place for American workers to stash even a small part of their guaranteed safety net, particularly under the apparently lax business regulations that, coincidentally, Social Security privatizers also have encouraged. It’s hard to believe that Congress would support more retirement investment in private companies while at the same time keep it easy for those companies to hide their losses.

President Bush pushed his idea for partial privatization of Social Security in his 2000 election campaign, when the country was at peace, the economy was booming and the stock market was rising steadily. Now the country is engaged in what promises to be a long war. The economy is in recession. The stock market is down and wobbly. And the seventh largest American corporation, seen as a perfect model for the “new economy,” has gone bust and taken a healthy share of investor confidence with it. The so-called personal retirement accounts are an idea that cannot work in

such an atmosphere.