You know, it's entirely possible that the original concepts of Social Security and Medicare were workable at the time they were created. Certainly Social Security, which simply involves issuing payments without any judgments having to be made about how the money is used, could have been maintained as its original safety net idea. Nobody at the time ever intended it to be a sole source of retirement income.

Medicare is now running into a double-whammy of demographics and the "third party" problem of rising prices that insulates costs from the end user. To be fair, the latter is also an issue with comprehensive private health insurance programs.

The solutions for Social Security will involve recognizing that it should be a safety net, and not a retirement program. As just two examples, I would have no problems with means-testing benefits, or raising the age of retirement based on current demographic realities. At this point, this can still be fixed with relatively painless course corrections.

The solutions for Medicare have to include doing something to bring competition and end user price signals back into our medical system. This will also help with private insurance costs. I don't have any easy "magic bullet" that will do this. Ryan has some ideas, but I'm quite willing to listen to any alternatives. Turning the entire medical system into a "free" benefit for all Americans is NOT the answer. It just doubles down on the original problem.

There are other issues that keep medical costs high, and I may put those in another post elsewhere.

We are in a power dive, and the only way to pull out of one without your wings coming off is to lose a lot more altitude while you're leveling off. This is not going to be easy, and a generation or two is going to get burned in the process, but it has to be done. And yeah, it would have been a lot easier twenty or thirty years ago, but everybody who proposed any reforms in entitlements got their balls shot off.