Social Security is in better shape than usually thought, according to a new estimate by the Congressional Budget Office. Instead of going bankrupt in 2042 as supposed by this and previous administrations, the CBO says that won’t happen until 2052. The report should raise the expectation that Congress will make small changes to Social Security now so that future congresses can avoid more dramatic changes later.

The challenge of Social Security is brought on by the demographic wave and trough of lots of babies born in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s, then proportionately fewer babies since. While the system currently brings in more money than it spends, that won’t remain true once all those baby boomers retire and an insufficient number of workers remain to pay into the system. Nevertheless, the CBO arrived at a new estimate of the date that payments would exceed revenues and the fund would become exhausted by using a model that assumed different earnings and productivity levels and lower inflation than what the White House assumed.

Politically, the news is mixed. President Bush has called for Social Security reform, including privatizing a part of Social Security, based on the idea of a coming crisis. If the crisis is more distant, revolutionary changes are harder to adopt. But minor changes in the retirement age, the cap on affected income or on the inflation rate for benefits could secure the fund for many decades beyond 2052, about the time that today’s teen-agers would expect to retire. Anyway, privatization would help secure the future of retirement only if government had a spare couple of trillion dollars around to account for the need to pay out benefits now.

Practically, this is a rare chance for Congress to demonstrate that it knows how to do something besides argue. Expectations for Congress are always lowered in a presidential election year, but Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist couldn’t even find a way to get a budget resolution passed, a lapse that the GOP pointed out repeatedly when Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle had the same problem a couple of years ago.

Imagine the popular support Congress would win if it made the small, long-term adjustments necessary to secure Social Security beyond the next 75 years. Long-range predictions are often inaccurate, but an agreement would bring peace of mind to millions of Americans and establish a precedent for the parties working together on such an important issue.

It would also let Congress focus on what the CBO identifies as a larger problem. “[I]ncreasing outlays for Medicare and Medicaid are projected to cause long-term shortfalls in the rest of the budget that will be even greater than Social Security’s,” its report said. “Unless taxation reaches levels that are unprecedented in the United States, current spending policies are likely to result in an ever-growing burden of federal debt held by the public, which will have a corrosive and potentially contractionary effect on the economy.”

Now, there’s an opportunity for revolutionary policy.