Like many other retirees, Bob Ball is concerned about what's going to happen to Social Security.

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He shot up through the bureaucracy to become commissioner of Social Security for three presidents. On his watch, Social Security became the biggest and most popular benefits program. And in 1983, when he had been collecting retirement benefits for four years, he was a key negotiator of the law that rescued Social Security from the brink of insolvency.

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"FDR talked about a basic retirement income that would guarantee a certain replacement rate for everybody to build on," Ball said. But the individual investment accounts proposed by Bush, which would allow younger workers to use some of their payroll taxes to ride the ups and downs of the stock and bond markets, would undermine that guarantee, he said.

His most controversial proposal: let the government invest some of the Social Security trust fund's surplus in stock index funds. Although this would allow the government to profit from expected — but not assured — market gains, critics have warned that it could also open the door to government meddling in corporate affairs, despite safeguards that Ball has proposed.