A looming crisis

Happy Veterans Day.

And that means the post office is closed for the holiday, so odds are the birthday card I'm sending my sister won't get there on time.

My sister was born 38 years ago Sunday. I would provide the link here to my original post celebrating this happy event, but unfortunately there is no such post.

Sarah, you see, is my older sister, and not having been born yet myself, I was unable to blog about her birth.

Of course, even if I had been around in 1966, I couldn't have blogged about her birthday because there was no such thing as a "blog" at the time — what with the World Wide Web, the Internet and the home computer not having been invented yet.

I mention all of this to illustrate how much the world has changed in my sister's lifetime. The world we live in now was almost unimaginable 38 years ago.

So imagine what the world will be like 38 years from now as my sister celebrates her 76th birthday.

Think hard about this and get ready, because her 76th is looming large. It's also "impending." And "imminent." All the newspapers and cable news stations say so. And President Bush says so, so you know it's true. The year 2042, they all suggest, will be upon us before you know it.

That date, 2042, is significant because that's the year when Social Security will begin having real financial problems. We've only got 38 years to fix this — 38 short years!

Faced with this looming/impending/imminent crisis, the Bush Administration is racing against the clock. By dismantling Social Security now they hope to avert the l/i/i catastrophe that may be awaiting the program in 2042.

Leigh Strope of the Associated Press thinks this is a good idea:

[Republicans] say Democrats can no longer criticize partial privatization without offering their own plan to deal with Social Security's $3.7 trillion, 75-year shortfall. As more baby boomers retire, the system will start paying out in benefits more than it collects in taxes in 2018.

Strope doesn't mention that this is when the Social Security trust fund kicks in — the trust fund people my sister's age have been paying into their entire working lives, to the tune of billions of dollars. And Strope doesn't mention that the trust fund will keep the system financially healthy for another 24 years after that. She's looking further ahead — to 2079. And with this 75-year Big Picture in mind, she knows that we have to act now to spare the nation (or perhaps the United Federation of Planets) the crisis that awaits.

You have to admire this kind of long-term thinking — and the crystal ball that allows the Bush Administration and reporters like Strope to speak with such authority about the state of the Social Security budget 75 years from now. I only wish they took a similar approach to considering climate change or the future of the world's fossil fuel supply.

Meanwhile, I've got to run to the post office to mail my sister a Happy 76th Birthday card. I only hope it reaches her in time.