"They'll want to give him the best education possible, but unless they live in a wealthy town with good public schools, they'll have to settle for less or find the money for private schools.

"This student will study hard and dream of going to the best colleges in the country, but with tuition rising faster than ever before, he may have to postpone those dreams or start life deeper in debt than any generation before him.

"When he graduates from college, this young man will find a job market where middle-class manufacturing jobs with good benefits have long since been replaced with low-wage, low-benefit service sector jobs and high-skill, high-wage jobs of the future.

"To get those good jobs, he'll need the skills and knowledge to not only compete with other workers in America, but with highly skilled and highly knowledgeable workers all over the world who are being recruited by the same companies that once made their home in this country.

"When he finally starts his job, he'll want health insurance, but rising costs mean that fewer employers can afford to provide that benefit, and when they do, fewer employees can afford the record premiums.

"When he starts a family, he'll want to buy a house and a car and pay for child care and college for his own children, but as he watches the lucky few benefit from lucrative bonuses and tax shelters, he'll see his own tax burden rise and his own paycheck barely cover this month's bills.

"And when he retires, he'll hope that he and his wife have saved enough, but if there wasn't enough to save, he'll hope that there will still be two Social Security checks that come to the house every month.

"These are the challenges we face at the beginning of the 21st century. We shouldn't exaggerate. We aren't seeing the absolute deprivation of the Great Depression. But it cannot be denied that families face more risk and greater insecurity than we have known since FDR's time, even as those families have fewer resources available to help pull themselves through the tough spots. Whereas people were once able to count on their employer to provide health care, pensions, and a job that would last a lifetime, today's worker wonders if suffering a heart attack will cause his employer to drop his coverage, worries about how much he can contribute to his own pension fund, and fears the possibility that he might walk into work tomorrow and find his job outsourced.

"Yet, just as the naysayers in Roosevelt's day told us that there was nothing we could do to help people help themselves, the people in power today are telling us that instead of sharing the risks of the new economy, we should shoulder them on our own.

"In the end, this is what the debate over the future of Social Security is truly about. After a lifetime of hard work and contribution to this country, do we tell our seniors that they're on their own, or that we're here for them to provide a basic standard of living? Is the dignity of life in their latter years their problem, or one we all share?

WASHINGTON TALK—"Since this is Washington, you won't hear them answer those questions directly when they talk about Social Security. Instead, they use the word 'reform' when they mean 'privatize,' and they use 'strengthen' when they really mean 'dismantle.' They tell us there's a crisis to get us all riled up about so we'll sit down and listen to their plan to privatize.

"But we know what the whole thing's really about. It's not just about cutting guaranteed benefits by up to 50 percent—though it certainly does that.

"It's not just about borrowing $5 trillion from countries like China and Japan to finance the plan—after all, we know how fiscal conservatives hate debt and deficit.

"And it's not even about the ability of private accounts to finance the gap in the system—because even the privatization advocates admit they don't.

"What this whole thing is about, and why conservatives have been pushing it so hard for so long now, is summed up in one sentence in one White House memo that somehow made its way out of the White House:

For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can win—and in doing so, we can help transform the political and philosophical landscape of the country.

"And there it is. Since Social Security was first signed into law almost seventy years ago, at a time when F.D.R.'s opponents were calling it a hoax that would never work and some likened it to communism, there has been movement after movement to get rid of the program for purely ideological reasons. Because some still believe that we can't solve the problems we face as one American community; they think this country works better when we're left to face fate by ourselves.

"I understand this view. There's something bracing about the Social Darwinist idea, the idea that there isn't a problem that the unfettered free market can't solve. It requires no sacrifice on the part of those of us who have won life's lottery . . . and doesn't consider who our parents were, or the education we received, or the right breaks that came at the right time.