A debate? What debate?

I'm away for a few days and, lo and behold, the "debate" over Social Security remains stuck in the Paleolithic age.

According to Josh Marshall,

Gregg noted that "over its lifetime, 75 years ... it's going to cost us $8.6 trillion, which we don't have." So that's an $8.6 trillion shortfall, albeit spread out over the lengthy period of three-quarters of a century. The president has said that he'll veto any effort to trim those costs. So that amount of money is manageable.

And yet Social Security -- the program that President Bush thinks is swooning and flailing like some B-Movie damsel in distress -- faces a shortfall of only $3.7 trillion over the same period of time.

The price of keeping Social Security kicking for another 75 years is less than half of that it will take just for the bill President Bush pushed through last year. And because of that Social Security has to go and the drug bill is inviolate.

Why, oh why, must we have this debate on training wheels?

And, of course, Democrats are supposed to join in a "debate" in which the real subject of the argument is determinedly kept off the table by willful idiots:

But, again, to ask this question is to assume that what we're having right now is a debate about shoring up Social Security. And we're not.

The debate we're having right now is whether to keep Social Security or replace it with something else. To press that debate with proposals about how to assure the system's solvency from the middle through the end of the present century is ridiculous. One might as well enter into an argument about whether or not to tear down the house with proposals for reshingling the roof and refitting the windows. The disconnect is too great for there to be any sense in it.

As much as the president wants to scramble it up and mystify the Crowleys, Blitzers and sundry Russerts of the world, we're having an important national debate about whether to keep Social Security or phase it out and replace it with something different -- most likely a system of unsecured private investment accounts similar to 401ks. Once that debate is over, and if it's decided in favor of keeping the Social Security system, then the country can debate how to best preserve it. But before that, there's just no sense in it.