The Washington Post has a front page story about how managing investment accounts is too hard to make partial privatization of Social Security and easy sell. Okay, fair enough. But they hinge the opener on Brenda Ellis, a mom with a lot of challenges on her plate. One of them is that she’s studying to be an accountant. The Post’s Jonathan Weisman writes:

Somewhere in this busy life stews roughly $13,000 in retirement savings from her 14 years at the U.S. Postal Service, in accounts that she doesn’t really understand or monitor.
“I don’t know what’s going on with it,” she said one night at a tax clinic in Southeast D.C. “I just know I have these three accounts, so I just say, ‘Let’s hope and pray. Let’s hope and pray it’s not going into Enron. Let’s hope and pray it’s not going into Tyco.’ It’s just hard to absorb all I’m supposed to absorb.”
In his push to add individual investment accounts to Social Security, President Bush maintains that people like Ellis have the most to gain — the working poor, living from paycheck to paycheck. With such accounts, they would have a nest egg they could invest in stocks and bonds and watch grow with the benefit of compounding interest. For the first time, they would have a sense of ownership and a stake in their nation’s economy and financial markets.

Couldn’t the Post have found a truck driver or a janitor with the same problem? This is a very unflattering profile of Ms. Ellis. No offense to her — she seems like a perfectly decent lady — but perhaps a career in accounting isn’t the best course. If she can’t keep abreast of what her own money is doing, why would someone trust her with theirs?