A Word to the Weary
Social Security is running deficits now. Its collapse is a matter of actuarial fact, not opinion. The Congressional Budget Office just released a report that says the national debt will reach 90% of our gross domestic product by 2020… and the CBO usually under-estimates the effects of economic slowdown on federal tax revenue. Two years ago, the CBO thought Social Security would not be in the red until 2019. Five years ago, Barack Obama’s party confidently assured us the program would remain solvent for decades. These people have always been wrong. They just compounded their errors with trillions of deficit spending from a bill none of them read.
So, yes, the situation is serious. You can’t wait fourteen years to deal with a meltdown that’s fifteen years away. Even if the system was not due to implode into a black hole of unfunded liability, the offenses against freedom required to create and sustain it would still be wrong. Those offenses did not begin with the current President. They began long before I was born. That doesn’t make them any more excusable. We should not accept decades of error as an insurmountable obstacle to doing better.
The task awaiting us at the ballot box is difficult, but not impossible. Laws have no magical, talismanic power – if they did, we wouldn’t need law enforcement. We can change laws. We can dissolve any body that tells us otherwise. No one can hold us down in our national deathbed. We are instructed to worship the political traditions of the 1940s, 60s, and 70s, when vast and eternal departments of limitless appetite and wretched inefficiency were constructed. Our birthright as Americans includes a far older, stronger tradition from 1776, which teaches us that only our liberty is eternal.
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