Last week, most of the major news outlets ran the perennial story about how the Social Security fund is set to run out of money—now by 2032—and that benefits will have to be cut substantially unless Congress acts.

Okay, so act.

It’s stupid that we are being made to worry about a problem that’s solvable, a manufactured crisis that conservative politicians are already seizing upon to claim we have no choice but to slash entitlements—here’s House Speaker Johnson eyeing them. And Social Security benefits are literally entitlements, as in, we are entitled to them because we’ve been paying for them via payroll taxes our entire working lives.

The dumb rule that lets heirs inherit a parent’s stocks without paying taxes will cost the government $379.3 billion over five years.

Now, it’s true that, for various reasons—an aging population; a Trumpian decline in immigration (workers who aren’t citizens pay into the system but don’t take money out); and the fact that high earners pay a relatively small portion of their incomes in payroll taxes, because the SSI tax only applies to the first $184,500 of a person’s earnings—the Social Security fund’s revenues will soon be insufficient to cover outgoing payments. A February analysis from the Urban Institute forecasts a gap of about $2.8 trillion over the five-year period from 2032 to 2036.

That’s a lot of money, sure. But there are other massive government expenditures we can do without. The nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center, based on scores from the Congressional Budget Office and the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), reported that Trump’s One Big Beautiful bill will cost the federal government $4.5 trillion in lost tax revenues over a decade—even as it slashes $1.4 trillion from programs low-income Americans rely on, namely Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps), and federal student loans.

President Donald Trump—who just expended American blood and treasure on a war in the Middle East that accomplished nothing except, perhaps, to leave Iran’s horrible regime in a stronger position than before—is demanding a roughly 50 percent........

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