By Frank Hyland
Food for thought.
Picture this if you will: You are on the way to a soccer game in your car with your kids and the children of neighbors in the back seat. Your SUV has been acting up and again this time the engine falters and sputters. It is running so poorly that you realize clearly that it is destined to wind up on the shoulder of the downhill side of the road, to run no more. The kids sit there disconsolately, staring out the windows, waiting for you to take some action on their behalf so that they can make it to "the game."
Now try to imagine yourself walking around to the rear of the vehicle and pushing it forward, only to realize that you and the children are approaching the edge of a cliff.
Dumb Question # 287: What do you do when you realize that the SUV is picking up speed toward the cliff’s edge? It was a trick question for anyone with more than four functioning brain cells. Of course you would do everything in your power, once you saw the danger ahead, to stop the vehicle before the children were hurt. Why, then, would anyone continue pushing your kids and others’ kids toward and over a cliff, you ask? Why, indeed.
By now you’ve figured out that the "SUV" is the federal and state programs collectively known as "entitlements," chief among them being Social Security and Medicare. Both have been the subject of repeated warnings, followed by repeated creation of commissions to investigate and recommend solutions. I would recommend, for openers, the near-term renaming of both, to become Social Insecurity and Mediscare as a means of getting the attention of those who still hope to become recipients.
In case those pushing the two programs off the cliff haven’t noticed, we’re now in the year 2008. It was one thing for proponents to put things off when we were still in the 20th Century, back in the ‘90s, and insolvency was still more than a decade away. For those who get elected every six, four, and especially for those elected every two years, that’s a lifetime and the problems can safely be "kicked down the road" for others to deal with. Depending on the date of the estimate and the source, the year of impending insolvency swings back and forth by a year or so.
Posted by Walt as Economics, Health, Social Security, Taxes at 8:31 AM EST