According to press accounts, President Obama is pondering a strategy to make substantial cuts in both Social Security and Medicare funding. A friend asked on The Twitter why I thought this was a huge fail, and I can't really explain in 140 characters. So, the first substantively political blog post in a while.

I won't spend much time explaining why I think Social Security and Medicare are worth funding or what is motivating there is a clamor to fundamentally dismantle them. I just want to present some important and often overlooked information about the economic underpinnings of these arguments.