Angry Bear is runs the go-to series on Social Security -- you know, the "entitlement reform" that Versailles, including the administration, is so enthusiastic about. Bruce Webb, who covers Social Security, responds to the latest round of tendentious pearl-clutching from the usual suspects:

Now there are some valid questions about whether the U.S. can sustain a Public Debt load that is as of last Friday $11,920,519,164,319.42 and projected to grow at $1 trillion a year for the next 10 years. On the other hand people who are using legalisms to tell you that somehow the $2.5 trillion of that $11.9 trillion that is owed to current workers and retirees is in a junior debt position to the $800.5 billion owed to China are blowing smoke. Legally, morally and even more important electorally the claims of American workers and retirees are if anything better than those of the Chinese Central Bank.

There are people who will make earnest claims that one branch of government cannot owe money to another branch. There is no legal basis for that claim, it is a simple exercise in logical hair splitting. The reality is this. A major part of total American income has been tapped to pay out retirement benefits to workers and to build up a reserve to continue those pay outs for future retirees. The excess dollars have been borrowed on behalf of all Americans including those who gain their income from sources not exposed to this particular source of taxation. Those people, whose incomes range from the lower six to the upper eight digits, by and large don't want to pay those dollars back and have hired people to manufacture reasons to convince people making five digit incomes or less that America as a whole simply can't afford to pay that money back and that the lower 95% or so of Americans just have to lump it and accept that as a lost cost. Well we don't have to lump it and have at our disposal democratic means that ensure that the the six to eight digit people pay back their fair share of the money that we all borrowed. Unless of course we fall for the spin being presented by the paid spinners at the Concord Coalition, Cato, and American Enterprise Institute. (And those were not chosen at random, they are the collective headquarters of the War on Social Security).

Just laying down a marker for when the Obama administration tries for a Grand Bargain...