天要塌了！天要塌了！

　　"Chicken Little" is one of the most famous tales for small children in the English-speaking world. One day an object -- usually a pebble or an acorn -- falls on Chicken Little's head. She (or he) concludes that the sky is falling and rushes about spreading panic among various associates, who are persuaded that the end is nigh. Eventually the hysterical birds all return to their senses.

　　So what is someone dressed as Chicken Little doing in today's cartoon by David Horsey? For this chicken-suited sower of panic, it's not the sky that is collapsing but the social security system, the government social insurance scheme that provides the basic pension earned by all working Americans and their spouses. US workers pay a social security tax that goes into a special fund supposedly reserved for pension payments.

　　Actually, in the course of a working lifetime workers do not pay enough into the system to cover all the costs of a federal retirement pension. (Workers can draw a pension as early as age 62, though most wait till 65, and even then will on average survive for about 15 years.) Instead the system depends on active tax-paying workers outnumbering retired workers. Back when social security was instituted in the 1930s, this was clearly the case. Not only were there many more active workers relative to pensioners, but average lifespans were considerably shorter than now. But today's situation is different: in America as in many other countries, low birth rates coupled with low death rates will lead to financial difficulties for the social security system in future years.

　　　A number of remedies have been proposed, among them higher social security taxes, a later age of eligibility (68 or 70 instead of 65) and reduction of benefits. Most controversial of all is President Bush's favorite: partial privatization. Bush is proposing that younger workers be allowed to put their social security contributions into special accounts that could be used to invest in stocks and bonds.

　　Critics point out that one of the points of social security is precisely that: securityfromriskfor every working person, hardly what②the stock market offers. But the Republican Party includes people with a deep loathing of the federal government and a particular animus against the centralizing "socialist" policies put in place during the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. David Horsey is suggesting that these "anti-government zealots" have been busy exaggerating both the threats to the social security system and the difficulty of fixing the problems. Their strategy: to panic poorly informed voters into a pessimistic acceptance of privatization as the only way to "save" social security.(听英文53599,文章注释535991)

　　WD White(美)