For the first time ever, Social Security will pay out more in benefits this year than it will have taken in — a threshold on the way to the system’s insolvency that Social Security wasn’t expected to reach till 2016.
This news brings to mind why I am down about health care reform. I don’t in principle mind expanding health care coverage to the uninsured. What alarms me about the law that just passed is I don’t see how we’re going to pay for it — especially given the coming catastrophe in Social Security and Medicare payments, which are going to shoot into the stratosphere this decade. We are unwilling or unable to govern ourselves. The course of the American empire is becoming ever clearer.