Okay, it takes effort to make me suspend my rule against politics on HN, but I have my limits. If you are some kind of troll, I nominate you for an Academy Awar

Okay, it takes effort to make me suspend my rule against politics on HN, but I have my limits. If you are some kind of troll, I nominate you for an Academy Award. First: Social security is solvent, it will be solvent for years, and to fix it will require a minor tax increase decades from now. Quit believing propaganda. Second: Our future budgetary problems are nonetheless real. But they are all about health care. If you really want to worry about balancing budgets in 2040, worry about that. Social Security is fine and will continue to be fine unless somebody deliberately fucks it up. (By talking like a fatalist, as you do, you inadvertently help the cause of the people who are trying to fuck it up; that is why we are having this little chat.) Third: The major problem in the USA today is that we have a massive excess of productive capacity. Not only can the country afford to feed, clothe, house, and entertain you quite nicely, but our biggest problem is that after we did this we might still have too much capacity. The economy is not well designed for such a situation, and it needs fixing. (Aside: The fix is called "stimulus", literally known as "printing money". People won't spend money? Make them spend it now. Create new money and give it away; make the old money move by threatening to inflate it away in the future. That nobody in power understands this, or that they pretend not to, is an epic failure of education and/or governance; the consequence will be millions of impoverishments and, likely, early deaths, perhaps even your own. Tragedy sucks.) To the extent that the country does not choose to feed, clothe, house, and entertain you and everyone around you, it is a problem of government, economics, and politics. It is not that we are physically incapable. It is that we are not so organized. The solution is to organize. Where will "the money" come from? Money is not a physical thing, like platinum. It's some numbers in a spreadsheet by which we keep score: If your number is higher, you get to control more about what the economy does. If you wake up and discover that all the money belongs to a handful of people who have gamed the ruleset by which money is distributed, and that they are failing to use their giant pile of money to direct the economy to keep everyone else fed, clothed, housed, and entertained to the correct extent: You change the rules, or you stop playing the game. By many orders of magnitude, the best option is to change the rules. Or, rather, to change one rule, to turn one knob that was designed to be turned: Raise taxes on the people with the money. That anyone contemplates suicide rather than go down fighting for this simple rule change is a triumph of modern propaganda. Get up out of the fetal position and be an American, for the love of all that is holy.