The NYT is doing some serious fear-mongering when it tells readers that Social Security is a program that along with Medicare "threaten to grow so large as to be unsustainable in the long run." Because are children and grand-children are projected to live longer lives than us, the costs of Social Security are projected to outrun its revenue in 40 years, but the projected shortfalls are relatively modest. They can be easily addressed by sorts of changes to the program (tax increases and or spending cuts) that we had in the decades of the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. There is no realistic sense in which Social Security can be termed unsustainable unless we take the view that unlike in prior decades, the program can never be changed.
--Dean Baker
