Time for the ice floe, Greenspan.

You kids get out of my yard!

Just a day after Republican leaders in Congress groaned that a vote on Social Security destruction would likely not come up in 2005, Alan Greenspan slithers up to the Hill and delivers this:

"Currently, 3-1/4 workers contribute to the Social Security system for each beneficiary. Under the intermediate assumptions of the program's trustees, the number of beneficiaries will have roughly doubled by 2030, and the ratio of covered workers to beneficiaries will be down to about 2."

Oh my God! Sounds like a crisis!!! Whatever shall we do, Uncle Alan?

"Raising national saving is an essential step if we are to build a capital stock that by, say, 2030 will be sufficiently large to produce goods and services adequate to meet the needs of retirees without unduly curbing the standard of living of our working-age population."

Wha? Since when did "raising national saving" become the key to fixing the Social Security crisis?

"Unfortunately, the current Social Security system has not proven a reliable vehicle for such saving. Indeed, although the trust funds have been running annual surpluses since the mid-1980s, one can credibly argue that they have served primarily to facilitate larger deficits in the rest of the budget and therefore have added little or nothing to national saving."

I see, so a huge Social Security surplus is a bad thing. By having money now, we are reducing our ability to have money in the future. Makes perfect sense to me. Just like having a federal budget surplus four years ago was an evil temptation that would sap our productivity and lower our standards of living. Perfectly reasonable.

So, what should we do about this awful problem of a trust-fund surplus?

"In my view, a retirement system with a significant personal accounts component would provide a more credible means of ensuring that the program actually adds to overall saving and, in turn, boosts the nation's capital stock. The reason is that money allocated to the personal accounts would no longer be available to fund other government activities and--barring an offsetting reduction in private saving outside the new accounts--would, in effect, be reserved for future consumption needs."

Ahh, yes: we must destroy the surplus in order to save it. I admire such simplicity. The solution four years ago -- kill the surplus! -- is still the solution today. We should get cracking on this right away. The ball's in your court, Joe Lieberman.

Why isn't this insane geezer on an ice floe?