President Bush’s proposal to privatize Social Security partly has been twisting in the wind for so long that hardly anybody noticed last week when a key senator officially pronounced it dead.

The assessment by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Finance Committee, nevertheless was jarring in one respect. He said Congress probably won’t make another serious effort to fix the ailing retirement program until 2009.

Until then, he implied, there will always be an election around the corner, heightening Congress’ inbred reluctance to do difficult, but necessary, things.

There was plenty not to like in Bush’s proposal. It would have allowed workers 55 and younger to invest a third of their payroll taxes in personal savings accounts in the stock market. Bush offered no way but benefit cuts to help the system to offset revenues it would lose from this. Individuals had no guarantee that their investment earnings would make up for their loss in fixed benefits. The proposal could have set in motion the dismantling of the most effective safety net program of the past century.

But Bush’s proposal did something useful: It forced Congress and the nation to confront, if only momentarily, a serious problem that will get worse by 2009: Social Security is running short on money to deliver on all its promises. The most recent estimate is that the Social Security Trust Fund will not be able to pay full benefits for retirees in 2041.

Over the next 75 years, the gap between what retirees are promised and what the government can pay will total more than $4 trillion. The longer Congress dithers, the more drastic any solution is likely to be.

As the Social Security Administration’s chief actuary, Stephen Goss, told Congress earlier this year, “By enacting needed changes sooner, we will have more options to consider, be able to phase changes in more gradually, and give affected individuals more advance notice.”

Democrats in Congress did an effective job at stopping the president’s proposal — for the right reasons. His plan would have created winners and losers, and would have increased federal budget deficits by huge amounts in the initial transition phase. But the Democrats still have not come forward with any solutions; they have no excuse now that Bush’s plan is all but dead. The silence is culpable. The Democratic leadership seems to show little interest in devising a set of serious options to save what has been the party’s most long-lived achievement.

Social Security can be made sound for the long-term through a combination of: increasing taxes modestly, slowing the growth of benefits, and other adjustments. The fixes are neither mysterious nor unfair.

Congress simply cannot be allowed to wait until the next politically convenient time to begin working on the Social Security problem.