Courtesy of Yahoo Finance, here is what's happened with the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the course of the last year:

Some people might not think it's very fair to pick out a great year and suggest that this performance is typical.  So here, courtesy again of Yahoo, is what has happened since 1950 with the S&P 500, a stock index with returns similar to what we might expect from investments in a personal retirement account:

Not too shabby.  According to Standard and Poor's, the annualized return since 1926 has been 10.5% (this includes capital appreciation with dividend reinvestment). 

How much return will we see on our Social Security money?  Somewhere around 1-2%.  This isn't just shabby, it's borderline criminal.