A tsunami of entitlement spending is threatening our economy, while providing no real security to retirees. We have made promises that we cannot keep. Under moderately optimistic scenarios Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will in the decades to come grow as large as the entire government is today. Someday the government will be forced to make drastic cuts in these programs, or crippling increases in taxes on workers – or both. The longer we wait to make the hard choices necessary to repair these programs, the harder the problem becomes. My children and their children will not receive the benefits we will enjoy. That is an inescapable fact, and any politician who tells you otherwise, Democrat or Republican, is lying. It is hardly statesmanship to ignore the obvious imperative of reducing the growth of spending for retiree income support, health care, and long-term care. And yet, year after year, our government fails to act. This failure has a real and distressing cost. Our workers make their retirement plans based on promised benefits that cannot be paid even if we burden our children with crippling taxes. If we fix the system now, people will have time to plan accordingly, to ensure that they still have a comfortable retirement. If we wait, we make the problem worse and, in effect, lie to Americans who we encouraged to put their trust in a broken system. I have long supported supplementing the current Social Security system with personal accounts – but not as a substitute for addressing benefit promises that cannot be kept. People of good faith in both parties agree that we must make the hard decisions to restore solvency to these programs and that personal accounts can ease the impact of slower benefit growth. But, too often, we prefer to nurture our own ambitions rather than defend the public interest. It is long past time for our two parties to sit down together and fix our pressing entitlement problems. And while it is a smaller problem than health care, we should start with Social Security because the fix is obvious in comparison, and much simpler. (emphasis added)