The WSJ-sponsored debate on Social Security between econobloggers Arnold Kling and Max Sawicky is well worth reading, if only to reflect upon the enormous gulf between President Bush's recent flights of rhetorical fancy on this subject ("flat bust, bankrupt") and his fellow conservative's more restrained and responsible delineation of the problem:

Arnold Kling writes: Max, I guess the first thing we have to try to resolve is whether Social Security can be safely left alone. Here are my thoughts on that subject.

If the definition of a crisis is that we could wake up tomorrow unable to pay benefits to those retired or about to retire, then we are not in a crisis.

What we do have is a legitimate reason to be concerned about the rate at which we are piling up government promises to future retirees in the middle of this century. If you add up the obligations under Social Security, Medicare and other government spending, including interest on the national debt, baseline projections are quite discouraging. We are not on a sustainable path, and something will have to give. Although we might earmark sufficient taxes to fund Social Security, that will only worsen the fiscal train wreck in the rest of the budget. Our future promises need to be more prudent.

Given Mr. Kling's underlying assumptions about the way the world does and should work, that's a pretty fair-minded assessment of the situation, and it leaves me with these two questions: (a) If even a deeply committed privatizer like Arnold Kling is now prepared to acknowledge that there's no "crisis" in Social Security, isn't it time for the rest of us to retire that silly trope once and for all? And (b) when, exactly, did we start to find it utterly unremarkable that bloggers consistently hold themselves to a higher standard of basic truthfulness than the national press corps holds the president of the United States?

(Via Glenn Reynolds.)

POSTSCRIPT: You know, I was in such a hurry to wrap this post up that I managed to leave out a rather important point: Game, set and match to Mr. Sawicky.