This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 2, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

Recession is throttling revenues that would otherwise finance Social Security.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Mike Tanner believes that now, more than ever, it's time to make

the hard choices on social programs President Obama says must be made.

The recession and the rising unemployment rate are taking a toll on revenues to the Social Security system.

What was projected to be Social Security surpluses of about 80 to 90 billion dollars this year and next,

now looks like it'll be well under 20

billion perhaps 16 billion or so this year and down to just 3 billion which is

basically a rounding error next year.

After that, it will go into deficits,

spending more on benefits than it takes in revenue.

And in fact, this February, this February it did that.

Social security spent more on benefits than it took in revenue.

So the so-called Social Security surplus is all but gone.

Even though Social Security is being affected by recession, how does the argument line up between the

security of Social Security as a program and the security of, you know, broadly diversified investments in say a personal account?

Well people always said you can't trust private investments, personal accounts because if the economy doesn't perform, those

investments will go down.

They pointed to the stock market crash we've just had recently and said, see, isn't it good that

we're in Social Security because these terrible

private investments have fallen off in value and they're right a bad economy hurts the stock market.

Of course if you had been investing over the long term, started investing

...