The fact is that the Social Security problem, together with Medicare, is enormous, and together they amount to fiscal quicksand upon which our financial future precariously sits.

Economists from the Wharton School of Business and from the Cato Institute recently estimated in the Financial Analysts Journal the massive scope of our national debt and deficit if we properly accounted for the liabilities in Social Security and Medicare. National debt amounts to $64 trillion, or five times our gross national product, and our real deficit is $2.5 trillion, or the size of the whole federal budget.

Anyone who follows Mrs. Clinton's various proclamations and proposals over time will not be surprised that facts and truth are not her priority. The priority, of course, is saying whatever it takes, in her estimation, to get elected.

It makes sense that Clinton wants to push an issue as important as Social Security to the sidelines. The collapse of our entitlement programs testifies to the failure of government planning, and grabbing power and government planning define everything that she is about.

While the senator tells us that Social Security is not in crisis, she is proposing massive new government programs, including a hundred billion dollars plus in health care spending and $20 billion in a new government giveaway for retirement savings, that will sink us only into a deeper financial black hole.

Sadly, these burdens will disproportionately fall on the low -and middle -income families that Mrs. Clinton takes politically for granted. Thirty four percent of our Latino population and 32 percent of blacks are under 18, compared to 22 percent of non-Hispanic whites.

Worse, Mrs. Clinton's message to folks who need to hear that their ticket to prosperity is exercising personal responsibility in a free country is that without being dependent on government, their future is hopeless.

How the Democratic Party has changed since that January in 1961 when President John Kennedy made his inaugural appeal to "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country."

A far cry from Mrs. Clinton's "...fairness doesn't just happen. It requires the right government policies."