Inevitability

A professor of mine quipped yesterday that without reform there would certainly be no Social Security for our (his students') generation. We see a lot of that viewpoint, so totally brainwashed into believing that Social Security will surely go belly up tomorrow if we don't give all out money to Wall Street. It might have been a joke, though he's not really the type to tell one. Even so, where's the opposite position in humor? Why doesn't anyone make light of the likelihood that with reform there will be no social security for the generation now entering the workforce? After all, it's quite evident that the Bush administration is completely ignoring the Congressional Budget office's economic growth numbers. As has been said too many places for me to count, Social Security's failure after 2041 is predicted by a prediction for economic growth far below what we've actually seen in the past 40 years. The Bush plan, however, hedges on economic growth of a much higher percentage to boost the value of the personal accounts (since, after all, the stock market has some connection to reality). But if the economy grows at that rate, we'll have a perfectly solvent Social Security system. Without getting into whether personal accounts are a good idea, doesn't it seem kind of strange to trust the reform to people who can't get their numbers straight?

Then again, this is the president who questioned Al Gore's "Fuzzy math."