Yes, Social Security will need some minor changes to account for increased life expectancy after retirement. It would be nice to get started on fixing this problem, but only if the people working on fixing it agree that the patient — meaning in this case the GUARANTEED benefit social insurance program known as Social Security — should be saved. Inviting George Bush and the Republican Congressional Leadership to help tweak the program to keep it going is a little like finding out your eighty something year old mother needs to have surgery and inviting Dr. Kervorkian to join her medical team.

Bush actually has proposed one half-decent, almost Clintonian idea: different COLA rate growth based on income level. But until he takes the poison pill of private accounts carved out of payroll taxes off the table, there is nothing to talk about.

A real solution is based on the “no free lunch” principle that Republicans used to believe in before they drank the Kool-Aid and started to believe that cutting taxes leads to greater tax revenues and other voodoo jive. So…you trim a bit here and there, over the coming decades, spreading and minimizing the pain:

1. Gradually raise retirement age to 68 or 69.

2. Gradually raise the payroll earnings cap.

3. Get those immigrants legal and paying into the system.

4. Means test COLA increases, as Bush proposed.

5. Invest a portion of the Trust Fund COLLECTIVELY in higher yielding bonds or stocks, as Clinton proposed.

6. Possibly, have private accounts as an ADD-ON, not a carve-out, as Moynihan proposed.

Another part of the solution, though it is too late now, would have been to run surpluses and pay down the public debt BEFORE the boomer retirement. Such an intelligent move, of course, was precluded by the Jews for Buchanan of West Palm Springs, who vote in 2000 ensured the election of a man determined to wipe out the surplus and “starve the beast”.

That’s one of them thar rhetorical questions, I think.

Markus, have you no shame, sir?

Surely the ?long-term threat to the SS program? stems from the fact that it is mathematically unsound, depending on a constantly growing population? And on the reality that SS has the perverse effect of actually giving us a shrinking population, as the Europeans have found to their cost.

Your allegations about Abu Nidal are unsupported, as usual.

Iraq, Syria, and Libya have all harbored the group and given it training, logistical support, and funding, often using the ANO as guns or hire. Abu Nidal began working with Iraqi intelligence while representing Fatah in Baghdad, experts say. He formed his organization with Iraq?s help and began by attacking Syria and the PLO. In 1983, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein expelled Abu Nidal and his group in an attempt to win American military support for Iraq?s 1980s war with neighboring Iran. Once the war ended, Iraq resumed its support of Abu Nidal.

In 1999, Egypt and Libya closed down ANO offices in their countries.

“And if Hitch wasn’t using the fact that Nidal was sheltered by Saadam as FURTHER justification for the invasion..”

Why use the word “further” if you aren’t implicitly admitting that the case for invasion was not solely based on Saddam’s ties to terrorism.

We’re trying, Buddy. We’re also trying to stop the biggest long-term threat to the SS program: the fact that the most powerful political party in America hates it and wants to get rid of it. The main weapon we have in this effort is the widespread unpopularity of said plan.

prokopton — Abu-Nidal also spent time in Egypt in recent years. Does this mean that the Mubareck is terrorist consort, worthy of overthrow? And if Hitch wasn’t using the fact that Nidal was sheltered by Saadam as further justification for the invasion, just what was the purpose of him bringing it up?