Social Security Isn't Broken?

[Geee]

American Thinker:

Columnist Charles Krauthammer is right, of course. Social Security is a disgusting fraud. Yet of all the entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, "Social Security is the most solvable." So it's a scandal that the Obama administration doesn't want to fix it.

But Social Security isn't broken. When OMB Director Jacob Lew says that: "At the moment, we look out and we see it solidly funded until 2037, and we think it is important to make the commitment to current retirees and workers, who are future retirees, that the system will be sound," he is right.

The simple fact is that Social Security payments are about 4.9 percent of GDP right now and they will rise to 6.2 percent of GDP by 2037 if nothing is done, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In the chart of the CBO Long Term Budget Outlook below, Social Security is the horizontal blue section. Medicare and Medicaid are the bright red section, the one that's going to eat the budget at 10 percent of GDP by 2037, 12.3 percent by 2050. Click this link if you want to look at the numbers.

Because "Social Security is the most solvable" of the entitlements, at a mere 5-6 percent of GDP, it might seem like a good idea for reasonable people to work on a solution in a spirit of civility. But President Obama is signaling that he's eager to use Social Security as an election issue for 2012.

We are never going to fix Social Security, anyway, until it is broke. What does "broke" mean? It does not mean that Social Security itself would be broke; it would mean that the government was broke. It would mean that the federal government can't sell its next debt issue and it's afraid to get the Fed to print it, and therefore it can't send out the entitlement checks any more. If you add President Obama's intransigence to the to the recent Wisconsin farce you realize that the liberals won't cry "uncle" on entitlements until then.