Health care and Social Security programs have added up to a clever Ponzi scheme ever since the New Deal, with young workers paying for the unfunded health and retirement obligations of their parents’ generation.

[Moody’s Investors Service’s] announcement that entitlement programs will soon be unsustainable is neither new nor surprising. For decades, serious observers have known that federal health care and Social Security costs would explode when the baby boomer generation began to retire in large numbers.