Wednesday, March 23, 2005

The year of reckoning moves closer

WASHINGTON, March 23 (Reuters) - The U.S. Social Security trust fund will exhaust its assets in 2041 instead of 2042 as forecast last year, while the Medicare trust fund is due to be depleted in 2020, rather than 2019, the funds' trustees said on Wednesday.

In addition, the trustees projected Social Security outlays to outstrip tax income in 2017 instead of the 2018 previously forecast.
I guarantee that the Democrats will now attack the Social Security trustees as pawns of the Bush Administration. It’s the standard modus operandi of that crowd.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Viking, I agree with many of your sentiments regarding Social Security reform. I do not agree that Bush should jettison private accounts though. While the Dems are busy blocking SocSec reform and a few appellate ct nominees, Bush and the GOP Congress are pushing through the rest of their agenda: tort reform, ANWR, etc. Rehnquist will likely retire this year and the vote will be too high profile for the Dems to filibuster, meaning we'll get our first Bush appointee on SCOTUS.

So I say let's hold off on both the nuclear option for the appellate court judges that are being blocked, as well as Social Security reform. Let's make these the big issues in 2006. The House is going to stay in GOP hands. At most, we'll lose a couple of seats, and DeLay could govern with a one-seat majority if he had to. But the Senate is looking more like 60 GOP seats daily. Let's win all the other stuff this year and next. Then, once we have our 60 seat Senate in 2007, we'll get the final pieces of the Bush legacy: SocSec reform and the judges.

Oh, and let's win the war on terror while we're at it.