Throughout President Barack Obama’s push for health care reform, the common portrayal was that health care reform was the equivalent of entitlement reform. All Congress would need to do is pass the Affordable Care Act to see long term solvency for all of America’s entitlement needs. Obama’s budget director, Peter Orzag, very bluntly propagated this falsehood in the Washington Post, in which he is quoted as saying, “Let me be very clear: Health-care reform is entitlement reform.” While medical inflation is problematic, at double the rate of overall inflation, it is not the primary driver in the expected expenditure growth – population aging is.

While the budget director was factually incorrect in implying that the Affordable Care Act would curb entitlement spending, the bigger misrepresentation is the implication that Social Security expenditures are not a problem that must be addressed. This is simply incorrect, insofar as every year that goes by without Social Security reform, reforms will hurt more in their implementation.

Both the 2009 and 2010 Social Security Trustees Reports mark 2037 as the date for insolvency. The date is very simple to decipher when looking at the projections for revenue and expenditures. It is based on there being very high cash flow surpluses from the mid 1980s until the mid 2000s, averaged with the projected cash flow deficits from 2015 onward. Clearly, this is not sustainable.

But the true fiscal problem is even worse. In determining the solvency of Social Security, the trustees count the surpluses as if the government is holding the physical assets in an account, even though this is not the case. The surpluses are used to buy bonds from the Treasury, and the bonds pay off other government spending. The assets in what is commonly called a “trust fund” are simultaneously liabilities. So long as there isn’t a surplus on the general budget, there isn’t a true surplus being saved for Social Security. Quite the opposite, America is currently facing the largest budget deficits and highest public debt in history.

If America was amassing national debt all those years, while also having surpluses from Social Security, imagine the fiscal scenario in the upcoming years as Social Security becomes purely an addition to that deficit rather than a mitigator. The bond-rating agency, Standard & Poor’s, projected that by 2017 rising debt levels could cause Treasury bonds to lose their triple-A rating, falling to junk status by the late 2020s. Now, factor in that our Social Security deficit only begins as our bond rating is expected to be lowered.

Furthermore, Social Security is not an individual retirement account that workers pay into, and never was intended as one. Rather, it is a program intended as a transfer of wealth from the currently working to the currently retired, with the government promising the “investors” that future generations will do the same for them when they retire. This should sound awfully suspect. After all, if there is a decrease in the growth of the working population or an increase in the retired population, people will get a bad deal. In fact, according to Social Security’s trustee, the only difference between Social Security and a ponzi scheme is “one of intent” with no difference in the financing.

If Social Security benefits remain at the same levels, students will inherit a bad deal. They will be forced to pay a greater portion of their wages to Social Security for current beneficiaries. Those wages could otherwise have been saved in private investment for retirement. In this way, keeping current benefits at current levels detracts from current students’ retirement. If reforms took the opposite course and limited benefits, current and upcoming beneficiaries would get a worse deal. Either way, reform will have to be made because the current path is unsustainable.

Office of Management and Budget Director Jacob Lew,recently tried to dismiss this reality in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor, saying, “Social Security does not contribute to the deficit in the median term…2015-2020, so there is no need to deal with Social Security.”

Factual error aside, this is an admission by Obama’s administration that they will not touch the benefits of the entrenched interests currently receiving Social Security, or those who will receive Social Security in the near term. Rather, the administration will put further jeopardy on the retirement of our generation of students. To this, students ought to be opposed.