Perhaps the easiest way for Social Security eliminationists to explain the whole "crisis" concept is to point out that the program use to have 50 workers for every retiree, and soon it will have only two workers per retiree. Max Sawicky gets technical and explains that this fact isn't as dire as it seems. Indeed, this ratio business is an odd way of arguing. We also use to have X farmers for every American that eats food, and now we have Y farmers/eater, where Y <<< X. But we didn't force every American to grow his or her own food, and things turned out fine. As America gets wiser and wealthier, we can do more with less—the pie's big enough for everyone.