Here, you get an overview of the looming bankruptcy of the Social Security/Medicare system. Politically, they are one program, which Congress is unwilling to challenge.

Your family's tax obligation rises by $25,000 per year. Its total is now over $500,000. The combined unfunded capital shortfall of all levels of government -- money needed today in profitable investments to pay off the obligations (mainly promised Social Security retirement benefits and medical care) -- is now almost $58 trillion, according to USA Today.

Today, the combined programs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid consume almost 50% of the U.S. government's budget. For a report on this, click here.

This percentage is going to go higher. On what is inevitably coming, click here for a 5-part report, published in late 2005 in The Washington Times. Please read this series. Then decide whether it's safe to assume that Social Security and Medicare will take care of you in your old age.

If this is too much for you, read this brief article, published in Human Events on February 21, 2007.

There is no statistical escape from bankruptcy, yet Congress pretends that bankruptcy is not inevitable. Why? Because voters will remove from office any Congressman who tells the truth about what is statistically irreversible. The question today is the form that the bankruptcy will take: outright default, mass inflation, or a salami-slicing reduction of benefits benefits.

The estimated deficit in Medicare, as of February, 2005, is approximately $63 trillion (with a T). See the Congressional testimony of Prof. Kent Smetters.

USA Today ran a front-page story on November 15, 2005 on the looming crisis. The Comptroller General of the United States -- who monitors the government's financial books -- says the situation is "worse than advertised."

In 1955, the Social Security program was known by Congress to be statistically unsound. Nothing was done then to repair it, any more than anything will be done today . . . or tomorrow.

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For evidence of how Congress siphons off the trust fund money, refuses to count this massive borrowing as part of the official budget deficit, and then spends the money, see these sites:

M. W. Hodges's "Grandfather Report"

Empty Trust Fund

Accounting Trick