Rail: 3, Joe Citizen: 0

Rail: 3, Joe Citizen: 0

No kidding.

Does anyone under 40 expect to receive a dime in Social Security? If so, what are the smoking?

The third rail

This much is widely understood: Raising the retirement age and some other benefit reductions (including taking the exaggeration of inflation out of cost-of-living computations) will be necessary because tax increases to fund current benefit schedules would cripple the economy.

It is axiomatic -- meaning, true outside of Washington -- that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts. Here are some facts, many of them gleaned from a new book from the MIT press, ``The Coming Generational Storm'' by Kotlikoff and Scott Burns of The Dallas Morning News. . . .

On Jan. 31, 1940, a check, numbered 00-000-001, for $22.54 was issued to Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vt., making her the first recipient of recurring monthly Social Security payments. Then, in an act of dubious citizenship, she lived to 100, dying in January 1975, having received $22,000 in benefits. That did not matter because in 1940 there were 42 workers for every retiree. Today there are 3.2 to one. In 2030 there will be 2.2 to 1. Nowadays, parents have fewer children than they used to, the children are geographically more dispersed and their sense of obligation is attenuated by distance and divorce.