Today we stand on the brink of a new year, and this is customarily a time for looking forward to what may be coming down the pike and also for looking back at what has been.

Looking forward to next year, it appears that President Bush intends to use some of his hard-earned “political capital” to address the massive shortfall facing Social Security when the Baby Boom generation starts to retire. He’s keeping most of the details of his rescue plan a secret for now (or as he puts it, refusing to “negotiate with himself”), but it appears that part of the plan will include allowing young Americans to invest some of their Social Security taxes in private accounts that could include stock and bond funds.

Bush hasn’t specified how the immediate shortfall in revenue for the already cash-strapped program would be made up if some of the incoming payroll taxes were diverted in this manner, but increasing the already massive deficit seems to be a strong possibility.

Does that make you feel any better about Social Security? If not, perhaps we should stop looking forward for a moment and look at a little history on the subject. As it turns out, Congress addressed this problem once before, and they actually came up with a pretty good plan.

The year was 1982. Ronald Reagan was president, mullet haircuts were “in,” and Ozzy Osbourne still had a musical career. Even way back then, some sharp characters in Washington could see that Social Security was headed for the tank when the baby boomers traded in their Rick Springfield ‘dos for bad comb-overs, and they decided to do something about it.

That year, a blue-ribbon presidential commission, headed up by a strapping young man named Alan Greenspan and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, recommended some serious steps to head off the Social Security disaster. Their recommendations amounted to tough but necessary medicine, and included raising the retirement age and stiff increases in payroll taxes to establish a trust fund to address the coming shortfall in the program.

It was a tough sell, but Congress recognized the dire nature of the situation and passed many of the recommended reforms in 1983. Voila! Problem solved, right? By now we should have this huge trust fund brimming with cash that has been saved to keep those retiring boomers in Depends and Ensure until the end of the century.

Well, that was the plan, but by now you can probably figured out how this little horror story ends. There is no trust fund. It was all a sham.

Congress spent the extra money that they sucked out of American wallets on, well, whatever they pleased. The money is gone, replaced by useless IOUs that the government wrote to itself that will never be repaid.

And now, staring down the barrel of another big government push to “solve” the Social Security crisis in 2005, how confident should we be that they won’t screw it up again? I’ll let you answer that for yourself. I’m going to take a cue from the president and refrain from negotiating with myself any further on the matter.

I will make one suggestion for a New Year’s resolution for all working Americans. For the love of Mike, if you want to live out your golden years anywhere north of the poverty line you’d better be saving every nickel you can spare on your personal retirement fund. If you’re counting on the government to do anything other than waste every penny you give to them for Social Security, then you are in need of immediate psychiatric evaluation, or at the very least a crash course in recent American history.