Looking for the soft landing

Ramesh Ponnuru also responds to Josh Marshall on Social Security:

But there are some reasons you'd want to start with a non-traditional solution sooner rather than later. For one thing, if you want to rein in benefit growth, starting earlier allows you to take less drastic means to do that. If we wait until the middle of the next decade, we will have to choose between cutting benefits for people who are already retired, raising taxes, and changing benefit formulas so that one generation gets lower real benefits than the one that came before it. If we act now, we have more options (such as reducing the growth rate of benefits).

There is also, relatedly, the generational-equity point: The longer you wait, the more pain you impose on the age cohorts that are already getting a worse deal from Social Security.

Gosh, that sounds familiar, and yet I won't be getting a check from WFB.