This week's Samuelson Watch is outsourced to Matthew Yglesias: But as usual, Samuelson is getting the scope of his analysis all wrong. The vast majority of the growth in spending on "Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid" comes from Medicare and Medicaid. And that growth is mostly driven by rising health care costs rather than by aging. Population aging, meanwhile, insofar as it's a problem isn't merely a challenge for federal entitlement spending. Insofar as a lower ratio of productive workers to retired consumers is a problem for Social Security, it's also a problem for everything else since the basic shape of the issue is that society can only consume as much as gets produced. Read Robert Samuelson's Washington Post column here.