Except, of course when they are not, as has been the case in what the Wall Street Journal so evocatively calls the Lost Decade, where stocks have provided no return over the past decade.

This is not surprising, seeing as how we are coming off a bubble, tech stocks segueing into real estate, and this is when stocks don’t do well.

Dean Baker asks the question the WSJ won’t, “What if your social security was invested in this?

The answer is that we, and our parents and grand parents, would be completely screwed.