WASHINGTON – Social Security and Medicare are fading even faster under the weight of the recession, heading for insolvency years sooner than previously expected, the government warned Tuesday. Social Security will start paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes in 2016, a year sooner than projected last year, and the giant trust fund will be depleted by 2037, four years sooner, trustees reported.

Medicare is in even worse shape. The trustees said the program for hospital expenses will pay out more in benefits than it collects this year, just as it did for the first time in 2008. The trustees project that the Medicare fund will be depleted by 2017, two years earlier than the date projected in last year’s report.

The trust funds — which exist in paper form in a filing cabinet in Parkersburg, W.Va. — are bonds that are backed by the government’s “full faith and credit” but not by any actual assets. That money has been spent over the years to fund other parts of government. To redeem the trust fund bonds, the government would have to borrow in public debt markets or raise taxes.

The issue here is not one of finances. The problem isn’t that the fund is insolvent or that there’s not enough money (the same holds true for Medicare, which is also addressed in the article…and for entitlement spending in general). Rather, the problem is a social one. It is the disintegration of the family structure that lies at the core of our entitlement problems. The family is at the center of our sense of community, our sense of caring. Rebuilding the family should be at the core of the Republican Party’s efforts to regain the hearts and minds of Americans, not balancing the checkbook. The reality is that you cannot even begin to balance the checkbook until you start to address the underlying problems…the real reasons that people are so dependent on entitlements from the Federal government.

The people of the United States understand this as well, and it is my belief that they are craving a party or a candidate that will really tell them what the real problem is. Stop talking about retirement accounts and how to make funds “solvent” (real people don’t use words like solvent, just so you know). Start talking about protecting families, personal responsibility, encouraging private wealth, etc. Real people on Main Street know that these are the solutions to our problems…they’re just waiting for their politicians to figure it out. Our problems are not financial…they’re social.

Hat Tip: Michelle Malkin

Most of these efforts revolve around one common theme: abandoning the core socially conservative principles that the Party has valued for decades.  The talking points are that the country has moved farther to the left on social issues, that those issues just don’t have the ability to get people to the polls like they used to, that the Party is out of step with mainstream America.

What few fail to see is that just because we’re losing the war of public opinion doesn’t mean that we should be abandoning our core values.  If we wake up tomorrow to find that most Americans think that high taxes are a good thing, it doesn’t mean that Republicans should suddenly become the party of higher taxes (although I’m sure that under this scenario higher taxes would certainly have it’s proponents within the party).  Similarly, just because the majority of Americans fail to see the real economic and social effects of policies such as abortion on demand and gay marriage, doesn’t mean that the party should drop it’s opposition to those policies.

Rather, the party needs to begin communicating to people, much more effectively, just why they should be opposed to these policies.  Rather than adopting the policies of the left, we should begin to combat them openly (and, I would submit, more effectively…more on that in a later post).  We shouldn’t be backing down from our social values, we should be learning how to debate them properly and taking our fight to the American people.

That is what this blog’s purpose is to be.  I will seek to inform and enlighten not only the American people but also the Republican base about just why we believe what we believe.  Contrary to popular belief, our opposition to bad social policies is not all rooted in religion.  In fact, most of the social policy that conservatives have advocated for decades has very real and devastating social and economic effects on this nation.  These are the things that I will seek to point out to readers.

Please keep visiting as this conversation develops.  I have a day job, so I can’t promise a flurry of posts every day as some other blogs do.  However, I will attempt to take the news and opinion articles of the day and use them to begin to lay out the debate clearly.  I encourage your participation via the comments system or email.  Thanks for stopping by.