JIM MANZI: CHANGE IS COMING:

If you had asked me at a New Year’s Eve party in 2006 what I thought the odds were of the U.S. government taking a controlling interest in the largest bank, the largest car company, and the largest insurance company in America, I would probably have laughed at you. Yet within 36 months, this is exactly what had happened.

My friends who are more liberal than I probably should not make the analogous mistake of imagining that benefit reductions that seem absurd politically right now might come to seem less absurd, and surprisingly quickly.

If you think about it, any real solution to the federal deficit problem is currently politically impossible; yet we know mathematically that, barring a productivity miracle, the situation cannot persist indefinitely. Therefore, we know that some change that currently seems politically impossible is all-but-certain to happen sooner or later.

Something that can’t go on forever, won’t.