ReZoom

Following up on Kathleen Casey-Kirschling -- the first Boomer to apply for a Social Security pension -- Bloomberg's Amity Shlaes serves up some thoughts on fixing our retirement system.

"Inflation indexing would reduce the Social Security shortfall of trillions of dollars by more than two-thirds," she says in endorsing the idea of GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson. "Under the current system," Shlaes writes, "seniors' base pension, the number that they start with when they are at the point of Casey-Kirschling, is calculated to reflect not only inflation but also real increases in the average wage over their careers."

By eliminating the peg to wages, the idea would be to lighten the growth and "reduce the Social Security shortfall of trillions of dollars by more than two-thirds."

Versions of that change have been attempted before and failed for one reason or another. But the situation being what it is (and what it's going to be without change), it bears looking at.