This excerpt originally appeared in e21 on May 29, 2012.

"The current rules incent lawmakers to enact the most irresponsible resolutions of Social Security and Medicare shortfalls – namely, to completely abandon all spending discipline imposed by their trust funds and to bail out the programs with debt-financed general revenue commitments. This incentive is created by the scorekeeping rules that essentially assume this outcome and thus assign no scoring penalty to it."