Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg and I trooped over to his Georgetown class yesterday to talk about religion and politics. I enjoyed the discussion–college kids must have gotten smarter over the last ten years.

We didn’t talk about Social Security, though, which is the topic of E. J.’s column today. The basic point of the column is to minimize the fiscal problem. He does this chiefly by ignoring the $5.8 trillion the government will have to come up with to pay for benefits between 2018 and 2042. Dionne also argues that repealing Bush’s tax cuts would cover the program’s shortfall. I’ll bet that he is, again, ignoring the $5.8 trillion (I haven’t had a chance to read through the report to which he refers). But there’s another point worth keeping in mind. The way our tax system is set up, the federal tax burden as a share of the economy rises over time. It’s projected to go up to an unprecedented 20.9 by 2018 and to 27 percent by 2078. Repealing Bush’s tax cut will yield the money Dionne wants only if we assume that the tax burden goes even higher than that. Congress probably wouldn’t allow that to happen, and shouldn’t.

E. J. objects to Bush’s reference to Social Security as “bankrupt.” “That is nonsense. By 2042 (or 2052, according to the Congressional Budget Office), Social Security will still be able to pay between 70 and 80 percent of promised benefits — which, because of wage indexing, would be higher in real terms than today’s benefits.” First of all, I think a lot of people and companies who go bankrupt end up paying a portion, but not the entirety, of what they have promised to people, so the word doesn’t seem inappropriate here. But I also think Dionne is making a bigger concession than he realizes. If an immediate 20-30 percent cut in benefits in the year 2042 is no big deal, then how terrible can it be to enact a plan that would involve reducing benefits in that decade so that they’re 40 percent lower than currently scheduled? Especially when that plan would involve a gradual change, with no year-to-year cuts?