While I'm on the subject of hopes for the mirror: Social Security.

Please, please, please raise the retirement-age kick-in threshold. Do it now so that the boomers don't blow out the budget. Social Security was supposed to support the incapacitated elderly, not a horde of physically-fit aging gentlefolk-of-leisure.

Sorry, Mom, Dad. I appreciate all the money you lavished on my raising and education, and I don't begrudge the last five years or so in which you were able to spend your time playing golf and gardening in central Florida, but if only on grounds of social utility, the economy could have used your labor and productivity.

It always was a lie that Social Security was any sort of retirement plan, and it's becoming increasingly clear that most legacy pension plans are likewise funded with air and bureaucratic bullcrap.

Mirror, mirror, please don't let McDermott kill the 401k system & force everyone into a parallel government-regulated and partially-operated "savings" system. In the short term, that would shatter the stock market, and in the long term, it would impoverish the working classes, pauperizing them and accustoming them to null or negative real interest-rate returns on investment, like the Japanese and their postal savings incubus. Please, prove me a liar when I campaigned on the dark suggestion that you'd let the McDermotts in Congress do something that disastrous.

I want to be wrong.