Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) came to Washington as the a tea-party conservative with the goal of fixing the economy, addressing the debt crisis and curbing the growth of the federal government. It’s an uphill battle for the youngest member of the U.S. Senate, but one he’s prepared to fight.

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In an interview with The Heritage Foundation, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) criticized her liberal colleagues for opposing Social Security reform, warning that they would rather increase taxes on businesses.

Hutchison singled out Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) for his repeatedly claiming that Social Security is not in trouble. Reid has gone so far as to call it a conservative “myth”. As Hutchison retorted:

“It’s clearly in trouble if its own trustees say its going bankrupt in 25 years. If that’s not a signal to everyone that we’ve got to do something now, then I don’t know what it would take. You can either do something gradually so that it doesn’t hurt very much, but will keep it solvent in the long run, or you can do drastic things, which of course Harry Reid would like to increase the taxes on employers.”

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There are two crises facing Social Security. First the program has a gigantic unfunded liability, largely caused by demographics. Second, the program is a very bad deal for younger workers, making them pay record amounts of tax in exchange for comparatively meager benefits. This video explains how personal accounts can solve both problems, and also notes that nations as varied as Australia, Chile, Sweden, and Hong Kong have implemented this pro-growth reform.

Social Security reform received a good bit of attention in the past two decades. President Clinton openly flirted with the idea, and President Bush explicitly endorsed the concept. But it has faded from the public square in recent years. But this may be about to change. Personal accounts are part of Congressman Paul Ryan’s Roadmap proposal, and recent polls show continued strong support for letting younger workers shift some of their payroll taxes to individual accounts.

Equally important, the American people understand that Social Security’s finances are unsustainable. They may not know specific numbers, but they know politicians have created a house of cards, which is why jokes about the system are so easily understandable.

President Obama thinks the answer is higher taxes, which is hardly a surprise. But making people pay more is hardly an attractive option, unless you’re the type of person who thinks it’s okay to give people a hamburger and charge them for a steak.

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All the lies about the Social Security “lock box” are now on full display. This is the year we will start paying out more from the SS program than we took in. We’ve gotten here even earlier than predicted. This wasn’t supposed to happen until 2017. Whoops…

Sounds like a good time to start tapping the nest egg. Too bad the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs, preferring to borrow from Social Security rather than foreign creditors. In return, the Treasury Department issued a stack of IOUs — in the form of Treasury bonds— which are kept in a nondescript office building just down the street from Parkersburg’s municipal offices.

Now the government will have to borrow even more money, much of it abroad, to start paying back the IOUs, and the timing couldn’t be worse. The government is projected to post a record $1.5 trillion budget deficit this year, followed by trillion dollar deficits for years to come.

But, wait!  We have $2.5 trillion in there and it’s earning interest. It’s real money. We’re fine, right? Right. Pull this leg and it plays “Jingle Bells.” This is the mess conservatives have warned about for so long. The lock box hoax is nothing but a promise from the government (us)  to pay us. Yes, the bonds will be paid, but that shouldn’t ease your anxiety. The money has to come from somewhere. Government only has two choices to get it:

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While Nancy Pelosi is excited that health care reform is only going to cost us $900 billion over ten years,  I wonder how we are going to get out of the current fiscal mess we’re in. Seriously. The GAO has a new report on how our long term financial situation is going to look like. A short sample:

“The federal budget deficit soared to a record $1.4 trillion in the fiscal year that ended in September, a chasm of red ink unequaled in the postwar era that threatens to complicate the most ambitious goals of the Obama administration, including plans for fresh spending to create jobs and spur economic recovery.

Still, the figure represents a significant improvement over the darkest deficit projections, which had been as much as $400 billion higher earlier this year, when the economy was wallowing in recession. Since then, the outlook has brightened and a government bailout has successfully stabilized the nation’s troubled financial sector. In a report released Friday, Treasury Department officials said the government had spent $132 billion less than expected in August, due primarily to a drop in anticipated spending on the banking bailout.”

You’ve got to love the “the glass is half-full” outlook of the GAO!

And yet, they do show that without social security and Medicare-Medicaid reforms things will get much much worse and fast.

Check out the charts in the report, they will stop you from having kids.