I sure wish we could get away from the political bickering on issues like this. Why don't we try to answer the original poster's question?

Sooner or later, massive changes will have to be made to entitlement programs. It's simple arithmetic. The growth in spending on these programs is unsustainable.

Can we rely on either political party to enact the necessary changes? The answer appears to be NO! If I had to bet, like Greece is experiencing now, it will be our creditors who demand that the necessary changes be made. It's no great secret what changes are necessary. They will be life-chnging for lots of people. It's just that both political parties are avoiding facing the inevitable in the interest of being elected for additional terms.

Has anyone noticed that even the most conservative spokesman, Paul Ryan, hasn't really suggested any changes to Social Security or Medicare? His proposal is comprised of tax cuts, cuts in defense spending, and deep cuts in discretionary spending, much of it cuts to spending on education and programs benefitting the poor and disadvantaged. Ryan hasn't proposed one dime in cuts to entitlement programs.

If the most fiscally conservative elected officials keep avoiding the obvious, you don't really expect more liberal elected officials like Joe Biden to make such suggestions do you? To the contrary, politicians on the left will appeal to the public that their entitlements are threatened by the other side, even though everyone knows that such entitlements simply can't be afforded for very much longer. But neither political party is willing to address the obviously needed cuts to entitlement spending--their " horizon" is the next election!

Unless or until we elect some people who both know how to do the arithmetic and are willing to put their political careers at risk by making politically unpopular decisions, I guess we can just wait for China to tell us how deeply we'll have to cut entitlements. And they will. It's only a matter of time.