Social Security is one of those topics that most people think they know about. Everyone“knows” Social Security is “going bankrupt,” that the government “raided the trust fund,” and that “it won’t be there when we retire.” These folks include both the ideologues determined to dismember the program and the casual consumers of mainstream media, which has been largely content to write he-said, she-said stories giving equal weight to the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration and“experts” wearing tin-foil hats.

But there’s a potentially more dangerous cohort than the Fox-educated crowd out there, says Eric Laursen.