Gasp!

The "Oh My Goodness! What a Shock!" Award this week goes to that perennial winner, President Shrub, who

will outline ideas about strengthening Social Security but will not spell out all the details of a plan to fix the system's financial problems when he delivers his State of the Union address Wednesday night,

AP reports. The article goes on to say that offering an outline rather than details "reflects a split between the two houses of Congress" about how to deal with the issue.

That, however, is almost surely wrong. It has been the White House's strategy all along to offer as few details as possible, preferring to stoke the fires of "Crisis! Crisis!" In fact, the article itself says

Bush is nowhere near ready to propose actual legislation, and a senior administration official cast some doubt on whether the administration would even be ready to spell out details in late February or early March, as had earlier been suggested.

As I noted on December 20, this is smart politics but bad ethics. (Yeah, another shock, I know.) The whole idea is to stampede the public and through them Congress into believing Social Security is untenable, so the only issue becomes how change rather than whether to change, thus avoiding comparisons between his noodlings and the current system which repeatedly come out unfavorably for the former.

A key to watch for is, in his references to Social Security, how many times Our Only President makes reference to the year 2018. That's the year when, by current estimates, Social Security will begin paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes. Some wingers are already floating the notion that at that time, there will have to be benefit cuts or tax increases "unless we act now!" Omigosh! The crisis is not 38 years in the future, it's only 14 years in the future! There's no time to lose! (The calculations were made in 2004.)

Not quite. It's true that if things go as predicted, after 2018 Social Security will indeed pay out more than it takes in. As a result, it will have to dip into its surplus to meet requirements - a surplus, and this is the important part, that was specifically created for just this purpose! It was specifically created because planners saw this coming and did something about it. So going to the surplus does not indicate a failing, either as a shortfall or a shortcoming, in Social Security. Rather, it indicates a strength.

There is no crisis in Social Security. Even if the very pessimistic economic assumptions of the trustees of Social Security were to prove accurate - and they haven't yet - no more than minor tinkering is required. (I'd start by lifting the ceiling on income on which Social Security taxes are collected.) We should keep hammering that same simple point: There is no crisis! Do not be buffaloed by the hirelings of the high and mighty into surrendering your future security. There is no crisis!