It’s all part of my Social Security fantasy

Robert Samuelson argues that the economic plight of Germany and Japan (average growth rate over the past 8 years: 1%) are a prelude to the institutional problems that face the United States:

A successful democracy gives people a chance to protect their interests and lifestyles. But when these protections try to deny unalterable economic realities, they become self-defeating. Still, it's hard to adjust to shifting realities, because changes offend voting blocs that benefit from the status quo. So it is that Americans have a massively complex tax system, because powerful constituencies protect many dubious tax preferences. So it is that huge U.S. budget deficits persist; any combination of spending cuts and tax increases arouses a coalition of the angry.

And so it is that -- despite a gradual aging of the population that will require huge and probably damaging tax increases -- no one has seriously attempted to contain these costs. It is easier to pretend that there will be no ill effects. The Japanese and Germans took the same attitude toward their problems. They hoped there would be no day of reckoning. They were wrong.

Katrina and Rita have only underscored the entitlement mentality that there’s no problem too great or small that cannot be buried under a mountain of spending. The crisis of entitlement spending is that while the Gulf Coast will be rebuilt someday, Social Security and Medicare will go on forever.