The reason entitlements are a huge fiscal time bomb is because of gross mismanagement of our national budget not because the programs are fundamentally wrong. It will require sacrifice of all citizens to continue supporting them but the alternative is stepping over the dead bodies in the street and dealing with a crime problem you can't even comprehend. How would you like your grandparents right now relying on a privatized Social Security with a good portion of the funds in our "stable" stock market?

Frantically-printed money isn't going to be a much better investment. At least stocks can go back up again (and incidentally, only an idiot would have most of their investments in equities if they were close to retirement age). Stocks are down like 40 percent from recent times, but are still far higher than they have been through the majority of my earning life. My dollar, thanks to endless borrowing, is worth half what is was in 1985.

The only way out of this mess is to put the health insurance companies out of business for standard health care and go to a complete single payer system with doctors paid a set salary not based on the procedure. The paperwork and infrastructure to manage health claims eats up huge amount of our health care resources and causes our industries to be non-competitive. I worked in the industry Tom. Your rants on this issue have not a single basis in fact.

So your solution to the massive current deficits of Medicare is to put the rest of the population on the program?

The numbers are what they are. If you don't like my "rants," try the Social Security office.

Yes, it would be educational to touch on these issues a year from now. I suspect Obama is still reeling from the realities he's had dumped on him.