Jim McTague‘s latest “D.C. Current” column in Barron’s contends the president’s Social Security plan fails to address key problems.

Leave the country’s biggest fiscal mess for the next guy. That is President Barack Obama’s strategy for addressing the disintegrating Social Security Trust Fund. The massive monument to Democratic Party progressivism, which comprises the $2.7 trillion Old-Age and Survivors Insurance program and the $70 billion Disability Insurance program, is on course to begin spilling red ink in 2019. Like prosperity, that’s just around the corner—beginning in the third year of our next president’s first term. The disability program will go red first, in 2017. Hold the cake and ice cream, the OASI program will have a deficit of $227 billion by 2025, Social Security’s 90th anniversary.

Obama did not completely duck the coming Social Security train wreck in his fiscal-year 2016 budget, published on Feb. 2. He had his team argue at a press briefing that his comprehensive immigration-reform plan, which was ignored by the last Congress, would “shore up” the program under stress as retiring baby boomers siphon off its money. Here’s the answer that Office of Management and Budget Director Shaun Donovan gave me at the press event when I asked how, exactly, the budget would help Social Security:

“Well, broadly speaking, the long-term deficit is significantly helped by this budget.” …

… WHAT DONOVAN DID WAS wrap a lump of coal with a pink ribbon and call it a diamond. He did not mention that many immigrants here illegally are paying a 6.2% payroll tax for Social Security, using fake numbers. They cannot collect because they are engaged in an illegal activity. Their taxes are free money to the system. …

… What’s needed is an overhaul of the system that reflects the fact that workers are living longer and exhausting more funds.