Americans find great comfort in denying possible problems until they become unavoidable, then inflating them to be so big as to be impossible to deal with, justifying continued inaction. This applies to economy (30 years of bubbles), scientific debate (global warming) as much as to the federal budget.

It's easy to fix social security, just remove the cap. Right now it is a ridiculously regressive tax, completely out of sorts with the rest of the tax code. Just make it a flat tax or make it as progressive as the income tax.

Breaking the social contract that social security implies is not a trivial matter. Sure, we could go back to letting people lose their livelihoods through a single stroke of bad luck (few months unemployed? lose house and savings. get sick living on the streets? tough noogies - you die), and to let the elderly beg in the streets (or starve under the bridges -wouldn't want to have to see them), but that seems unlikely to be acceptable to most Americans. As it is, America's poverty rate is already humiliatingly far over that of modern nations everywhere, and its influence on children disproportionately large.

While I agree that the federal budget is an aweful mess, and in my view should be the top priority of the next administration (in addition to addressing the trade balance and (lack of) household savings, the other two big deficits of the US economy), I don't think it's time to go back to the nineteenth century yet.