That question is now playing out in the tension between perhaps the longest-held desire of traditional conservatives—if not to end completely at least to eviscerate entitlements—and the completely contrary views of Donald Trump and his core supporters, who propelled the complete Republican seizure of government. Trump, whose support lies largely amongst older Americans, has repeatedly promised that he won’t cut the entitlements on which his voters rely, but that clearly conflicts with his party’s agenda in Congress, and, so far, when the former have collided with the latter, the latter have won.

Even before the newly-minted GOP tax plan passed the Senate, adding a whopping $1.5 trillion to the national debt in order to give away the store to corporations and the wealthiest Americans, these lawmakers were already “discovering” that their own profligacy requires bringing down the deficit by (you guessed it) cutting entitlements. Speaker Paul Ryan announced that “we’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit,” even as he began negotiations with his Senate counterparts over exactly how much they’re gleefully going to increase the very same debt and deficit.

Democrats, and most Americans, will rightly resist such a cynical gambit. But that leaves the very real challenges of the deficit, entitlements, and the future they largely will frame still unresolved.

The fundamental problem is that Social Security and Medicare were sold to the public on a fiction—and until Americans grapple with that, they’re unlikely to achieve a consensus on fixing the programs.

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When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt pushed through Social Security—a guaranteed retirement income—in the wake of the Great Depression, it was a different America. For one thing, growing old in America prior to 1935 basically meant growing poorer and poorer: Half of all seniors lived below the poverty line, more than any other age group. By 1960, that had fallen to 35 percent—but still double the rate amongst all other Americans. Today, thanks largely to entitlement programs, and belying the conservative mantra that government doesn’t know how to fight poverty, the elderly poverty rate stands below 9 percent, the least amongst any age cohort.

But if FDR’s America was a place where it was dangerous to grow old, it was also a country unaccustomed, and resistant, to large-scale income transfer programs. Social Security therefore was designed to look like, and sold as, simply a government-administered pension program, not “welfare” in any way, shape, or form. The program was supported not by the progressive income tax but by payroll deductions—impliedly pension contributions. Americans were given Social Security numbers, looking like a bank account, and are still sent regular “statements” of their “contributions” and what the projected payouts on those supposed-savings look like. (Medicare was crafted to create the same impression.)