The Wake Up Project

In Washington these days, the only topics of discussion seem to be how many trillions to throw at health care and the recession, and whom on Wall Street to pillory next. But watch out. Lurking just below the surface is a bailout candidate that may soon emerge like the great white shark in Jaws: Social Security. Perhaps as early as this year, Social Security, at $680 billion the nation's biggest social program, will be transformed from an operation that's helped finance the rest of the government for 25 years into a cash drain that will need money from the Treasury. In other words, a bailout. I've been writing about Social Security's problems for more than a decade, arguing that having the government borrow several trillion dollars to bail out Social Security so that it can pay its promised benefits would impose an intolerable burden on our public finances. However, I've changed my mind about what "intolerable" means. With the government spending...