The Congressional Budget Office, the economic forecasting arm of the Congress, now reports that the Social Security trust fund is almost in the red. They project that the fund's surplus next year will be a scant $3 billion.

For perspective, CBO just 12 months ago projected that this same surplus would be $86 billion -- almost 30 times larger. Plus, the CBO estimated then that the fund would not be in the red for another ten years. Now it looks like it may be next year.

Beyond discovering that Social Security is in even worse shape than anyone thought, might there be a learning opportunity here?

As President Obama takes our government into the automobile business, the mortgage and banking businesses, the health care business, the energy business, and the environmental planning business, he is working on a basic premise.

This premise, of course, is that we'll be better off if we turn more of our lives and resources over to government bureaucrats to manage. Not only has this been tried many times. Every time it's been tried, it's been a complete failure.

But despite the consistent failures of government management, Barack Obama has America believing it will be different this time. He has turned up with an old, flea-bitten, worm infested mutt and everybody's excited that they are getting a new puppy. Yes, the man can sell.

The magic is so powerful that, as we set off to re-invent America, few are paying attention to the broken, bankrupt dinosaurs on our hands that are the products of our previous forays in exactly the same direction.

The first, of course, was Social Security. When Roosevelt signed it into law in 1935, he said it would address the problem that "the civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure."

His great idea for making our lives secure was to tax everyone working and use those funds to pay stipends out to those who are retired.

The social engineering made sense to many in 1935, when the country had 40 people working for everyone retired. Continued...