This commentary on Nov. 5 and Aug. 26, 2008, available on the Web site, www.freecongress.org, and on Dec. 16, 2004, text following, has discussed the steadily more dangerous impact of our increasing American lifespan upon the solvency of our Social Security system.

If those consistently more threatening statistics were not dire enough, Social Security is now further endangered by the recession. Economists’ projections vary as to the duration and intensity of the recession but none appears to opine that it will continue to inflict our economy for less than another year or so.

The nonpartisan and generally reliable Congressional Budget Office reports that payroll tax revenue is dropping dangerously. Unemployment is in the 9 percent range, figures varying by source and by date. However, an exact figure may be unnecessary. The point is that Social Security revenue is dangerously down. Hence, one need not quibble unduly with budget office calculations.

In August 2008, it estimated that by 2020 the so-called surplus in the Social Security Trust Fund will have evaporated – that is, been consumed. It projected an $80 billion surplus in 2009, $90 billion in 2010, and then a consecutive annual shrinking. The recessional impact has worsened that direct estimation. The budget office more recently is estimating a 2009 surplus of about $16 billion, 2010 of about $3 billion, and, after that, deficits. It has no jurisdiction over the Social Security Trust Fund, which has its own – largely political – trustees, but that’s beside the point.

The Obama administration has offered no purported approach to either the mechanics or the substance of a solution. The naming of an exploratory task force informally was bandied about but that possibility has been either deferred or buried.

The reality is the everlastingly fatal political third rail, as the late Sen. Barry Goldwater discovered. Recall that Goldwater addressed the improper financing of Social Security at a retirement community in Florida in his disastrous presidential campaign.

The population is aging beyond all precedent and prediction. Remarkably expert and innovative medical care, healthier diet, cleaner living conditions, exercise and perhaps attitude are phenomena which combine to promote longevity.

As “The Iron Chancellor,” Otto von Bismarck, and that most politically masterful of modern American Presidents, Franklin Roosevelt, well understood, the age at which to commence social-security eligibility is the age of the average life expectancy. Pity the poor candidate whose “audacity” – to use that seemingly “in” noun – and objectivity combine so that the candidate addresses the subject and then watches the voters and votes fly elsewhere.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Marion Edwyn Harrison is president of, and counsel to, the Free Congress Foundation.)

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