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The First Blumieblooper

In what may be the first blooper during what promises to be Sen. Dick Blumenthal’s long term in the U.S. Congress, the senator told ABC News: “I think that we will need to address Social Security — if the current trends continue — sometime after the next 10 years or so, but not as part of dealing with the deficit."

It is one thing to kick the social security can down the road ten years, quite another to assert that the problem with the program can be settled without increasing the deficit.

Social security, mistakenly thought by some to be a savings program in which retirees draw from a pool of money to which they have contributed during their working lives, is actually something of a Ponzi scheme in which current retirees draw money from current workers. When the withdrawals exceed current contributions, you have a serious problem, which Mr. Blumenthal proposes to address ten years down the road.

That problem cannot be addressed as other than a deficit issue. Mr. Blumenthal, suer in chief as attorney general in Connecticut, would have known this if he were a business executive used to handing budgets. Alas, he is no Linda McMahon, the Republican Mr. Blumenthal defeated on his march to immortality as Connecticut’s soon to be senior U.S. Senator, an event that will occur, one hopes, before the social security system goes belly up.

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