http://bit.ly/8e43Bl - - - Entitlements: While a massive health care entitlement is fashioned in secret, another one, Social Security, is running deficits decades earlier than expected. We've been kicking the can down the road. We're out of road.
As Bernie Madoff found out, any Ponzi scheme depends on a continuous inflow of new cash and new customers or the ever-expanding pyramid will totter and collapse. Social Security, dependent as it was on new workers paying the expanding benefits of retirees, is about to, much sooner than expected. As Ed Morrissey over at HotAir.com reminds us, Peter Orszag, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, predicted as director of the Congressional Budget Office in August 2008 that no one needed to worry about Social Security. "CBO projects that outlays will first exceed revenues in 2019 and that the Social Security trust funds will be exhausted in 2049," we were told. As the baby boomers have started retiring and the economy has collapsed, that day of reckoning is here. The Social Security Administration's Office of the Chief Actuary finally got around to posting detailed November numbers, and they aren't pretty. - - - Really, what we need now is to enshrine another $2 trillion entitlement. Yea, that's the ticket. - Publius -- "It ought never to be forgotten, that a firm union of this country, under an efficient government, will probably be an increasing object of jealousy to more than one nation of Europe; and that enterprises to subvert it will sometimes originate in the intrigues of foreign powers, and will seldom fail to be patronized and abetted by some of them. Its preservation, therefore ought in no case that can be avoided, to be committed to the guardianship of any but those whose situation will uniformly beget an immediate interest in the faithful and vigilant performance of the trust." [Federalist Papers #59] _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
