There are those among us who plan to be dead by age 27, but for everybody else, there are important things going down in Washington. The Social Security System was introduced by Franklin Roosevelt 70 years ago, and ever since has served America by providing for the infirm, widowed, and elderly, giving a security blanket to all. But times have changed, and now we must consider another option fraught with risk and uncertainty.

It has long been a fixture of the Social Security dialogue that as life expectancy increases, the ratio of retired people who draw from the Social Security well to those workers who fill it is decreasing; that is, that there are fewer and fewer contributors per beneficiary, and this is a recipe for disaster. However, this problem concept has been very much thought of since the inception of the program. Every time there is going to be an increase in the retired population, the Social Security tax is raised in advance to dampen the transition. It was done in the 60s, to provide for the dramatic shift in the 70s, and it was done again in 1982, championed by none other than George H. Bush (the elder), to provide for the still coming shift.

Social Security has been saving money for more than 20 years. Every year since the tax 1982 increase, the Social Security Administration (henceforth, the SSA) has run a budget surplus of hundreds of billions of dollars. This surplus is not thrown away. Instead, it is saved in a Social Security Trust Fund—a system of Treasury Bonds which lends the extra money into the Banking industry, so that these tabs can be called in when the SSA needs the money in the future. This is done in order to procure interest rates, which protect the Trust Fund from losing value against America's raging inflation. If there was no protection from inflation, then every dollar that was put into the Trust Fund in 1982—which then would have been worth as much as ten candy bars, or two gallons of gas—would still be only a dollar today, and we know how little that can buy you in 2005.