Strom is right about the inability of our government to afford the welfare it has promised to us, but he gives too much credit to government for inventing the problem or to private enterprise’s ability to fix the problem.

Long before Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other current federal entitlement programs, our corporations instituted defined benefit retirement programs (if not for their low wage employee, at least for their executives) without much real thought as to the effects of the financial burden on their long term cost structure. Just recently have corporations faced this issue, many by converting their pension programs to defined contribution programs and by increasing worker out-of-pocket cost sharing but generally taking executive benefits out of the hide of corporate ownership. Some companies (in the auto and steel industry, for example) have disappeared or have had their dominance fade because of the impossible cost of financing retiree and current worker corporate entitlements.

If Strom were more constructive, he might suggest that government might take a businesslike strategy to deal with entitlements, such as by financing future benefits with current tax contributions instead of a pay-as-you-go financing strategy, and by adjusting entitlement payouts to financial returns from the entitlement fund.

But Strom’s “blame it on the government and let private enterprise fix it” is absurd. Private enterprise invented defined benefit retirement entitlements in the first place, took far too long to recognize the financial consequences, and solved their problem at least partly by dumping their past obligations back on the government and partly by refusing to recognize the benefit obligations they promises to their past and present workers. And neither of those corporate methods are acceptable solutions for our government’s problems.