In the e-mail, Wehner, director of White House Strategic Initiatives, urged cuts in future promised benefits as the best approach to overhaul the system to private investment accounts. Failure to make the cuts would cause "short-term economic consequences," he wrote. The e-mail outlines some of the difficult financial trade-offs required to carve out accounts from the system - details the administration has so far refused to discuss publicly.

"We need to establish in the public mind a key fiscal fact: right now we are on an unsustainable course," Wehner's e-mail said. "That reality needs to be seared into the public consciousness; it is the precondition to authentic reform."

For much more on this topic, visit Atrios, Kevin Drum, Josh Marshall, Maxspeak and Brad DeLong, who reprints the entire memo here.

As one of the commenters on TalkLeft wrote,

This is the AARP congressional contact line for "Social Insecurity," as they aptly put it. It's the war of wealth against work. Take some action - say NO to this destruction of Social Security: 1-800-307-8525

You can get through to your own representatives on that line and give them a piece of your mind.

We pay for THEIR retirements; they'd better preserve our safety net.