Social Security sham.(Correction, Please!)(influence of politics in social security)

ITEM: The Buffalo News for January 25 called for entitlement reform, noting that, for example, the trustees for Social Security "have long foreseen the problems. In 2011--just two years from now--Social Security will begin taking in less money than it pays out. Without action, the program's reserves will be depleted by 2041.... Theoretically, Washington should have attended to this problem already, but it is almost certainly better that it didn't."

The Buffalo News continued:

 
   Former President George W. Bush 
   put entitlement reform at the top of 
   his second-term agenda, but neither 
   he nor the Republicans who then 
   controlled Congress could have been 
   considered friends of Medicare or 
   Social Security.... 
 
      Now, with program-supportive 
   Democrats controlling the White 
   House and Congress, the country can 
   have greater confidence that the people 
   pursuing these painful reforms at 
   least recognize the value of Social 
   Security and Medicare to millions of 
   older Americans. 

ITEM: Testifying before the House Budget Committee on January 27 was economist Alice Rivlin, the former budget director under President Clinton, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a visiting professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. Rivlin's testimony ("Budget Policy Challenges") was posted by Brookings on January 30.

Rivlin sees the current economic turmoil as a welcome opportunity to "fix" government entitlement programs, including Social Security. Said Rivlin: "The crisis may have made Social Security less of a political 'third rail' and provided an opportunity to put the system on a sound fiscal basis for the foreseeable future. Fixing Social Security is a relatively easy technical problem. It will take some combination of several much-discussed marginal changes: raising the retirement age gradually in the future (and then indexing it to longevity), raising the cap on the payroll tax, fixing the COLA [cost-of-living allowance], and modifying the indexing of initial benefits so they' grow more slowly for more affluent people. In view of the collapse of market values, no one is likely to argue seriously for diverting existing revenues to private accounts, so the opportunity to craft a compromise is much greater than it was a few years ago."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

CORRECTION: Born during the hard times of the Great Depression, Social Security is to be saved during the current recession. Or so its apologists hope.