From each according to his ability …
On the campaign trail in Oregon, where he was still expected to win the Democratic presidential primary despite a late rally by New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama on Sunday called likely GOP nominee Sen. John McCain of Arizona a threat to Social Security as it's currently structured.
We should only wish.
In a front-page story the next day, USA Today revealed the U.S. government uses accounting tricks that would never be permitted in private industry to understate the extent to which the federal Medicare and Social Security entitlements are actually in the hole.
Officially, Washington contends the 2007 federal deficit -- the amount of spending for which it had no cash on hand -- was $162 billion, down from $248 billion a year earlier.
But the accountants on the Potomac get away with that only by limiting their tally to the payments they actually made last year. In contrast, accounting standards for private corporations and state governments require them to report new financial obligations accrued each year -- promises made -- even if the payments won't be made till later.
If such standard accounting methods were applied to the federal obligations, taxpayers would know the federal government actually ran up $2.5 trillion in new liabilities last year, which "dwarfs the $162 billion the government officially announced as last year's deficit," the newspaper reports.
And that's just the one-year total. Overall, U.S. taxpayers are actually on the hook for a record $57.3 trillion in federal liabilities to cover lifetime benefits promised everyone eligible for Medicare, Social Security, and other federal programs -- nearly $500,000 per American household, the newspaper reports.
"We're running deficits in the trillions of dollars, not the hundreds of billions of dollars we're being told," says Sheila Weinberg, chief executive of the Chicago-based Institute for Truth in Accounting.
Medicare, which took on $1.2 trillion in new obligations in 2007, has a total unfunded liability of $30.4 trillion. Social Security? $900 billion.
Some economists say these figures are no big cause for worry, because future generations will be wealthier, and will thus have more money to pay off the bills.
That might be true if costs were fixed -- if new workers signing on for Medicare were told they or their doctors will be paid for 2028 surgeries only what that surgery would have cost in 2008; if those signing up for Social Security were warned they'll receive checks only adequate to buy groceries at 2008 prices, not at 2055 prices.
But that's not true. Benefits go up with inflation.
Indeed, the most sensible short-term fixes are precisely the ones Sen. Obama jeered Sen. McCain for considering -- raising the retirement age or trimming annual "cost-of-living" raises.
A longer-term solution would be reviving George W. Bush's stillborn attempt to put the retirement program on a solid fiscal footing by allowing optional, privately owned accounts.
But again, Sen. Obama thrilled the redistributionist crowd in Portland by condemning just such sensible attempts to give workers the choice of assuming private ownership of part of their retirement funds -- even while allowing those afraid of such responsibility to keep their accounts just the way they are.
Sen. Clinton is drawing some criticism, these days, for saying -- in more and more direct fashion -- that Barack Obama can't be elected president because he's black.
That is indeed a forlorn prediction.
How odd that no one suggests Barack Obama may be unelectable because he's a socialist.
Ridiculing all sensible attempts to make the entitlement programs self-sustaining, the senator from Illinois has only one "solution" to offer for the unsustainability of Medicare and Social Security: Grab more money from the wealthy and shovel it down the line to "the poor" -- punishing the kinds of behaviors that allow some hard-working Americans to prosper and save, while rewarding the kinds of behaviors that leave others with their hands out, bleating for succor.
