Medicare and Social Security Challenge
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, March 1 - When Alan Greenspan urged Congress last week to cut future benefits in Social Security and Medicare, sending elected officials to the barricades, he was if anything understating the magnitude of the problems ahead. Today's budget deficits are measured in the hundreds of billions, but the looming shortfalls for the two retirement programs are projected to be in the tens of trillions of dollars.

The Bush administration has estimated that the gap between promises under current law and the revenues expected will total $18 trillion over the next 75 years. But an internal study in 2002 by the Treasury Department, looking much further ahead, concluded that the gap was actually $44 trillion - and would climb each year that nothing was done.

Indeed, the numbers are so big and extend so far into the future that they border on the surreal. Analysts in both Congress and the administration warn that the flood of retiring baby boomers will cause federal spending on old-age benefits to eventually consume as much of the nation's economy as the entire federal budget does now. And while the problems would be acute even if today's federal budget were balanced, the budget deficits that seem likely for the rest of the decade make matters worse. That is because the government is borrowing more than $200 billion a year from the Social Security and Medicare trust funds to finance its operating deficits.