This piece is front-and-center at business- and Wall Street -friendly bloomberg.com today:
Jan. 21 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush's assertions that Social Security faces a crisis and is ``flat bust, bankrupt'' are patently false.
Bush and other administration officials are greatly exaggerating potential problems facing the program to push through changes that would undermine the most successful social insurance program in the nation's history.
The system is so far from crisis or bankruptcy that the truly prudent course at this point most certainly would be to make no changes in Social Security at all. Wait and see if even under conservative assumptions the date at which the system's trust fund would be exhausted keeps receding.
In 1994, Social Security trustees put that date at 2030 using their intermediate projection, the middle one of three. By 2004, 10 years later, the date had been pushed out 12 years, to 2042. And even after that, 75 percent of promised benefits could still be paid.
That's neither a looming crisis nor bankruptcy.
Bush has no intention of being prudent.
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http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&refer=columnist_berry&sid=aJ9dbBFwsZ1k