Today's New York Times lead editorial takes President Bush and Congress to task for failing to do something about a looming crisis with many private pension plans. Unfortunately, but naturally, the Times fails to offer a plan of its own. One is left wondering how best to fix the problem, and the Times is silent.

Setting that aside for a moment, as I read the first couple paragraphs of the editorial I wondered if today's editorial could be adapted easily to address another looming crisis -- Social Security.

Delta could soon become the third major airline in the past two years to default on its pensions. If it does, federal pension insurance would cover some $8.4 billion in benefits. Even so, many Delta employees could end up with less than they expected. And American taxpayers would move closer to the prospect of having to bail out the federal pension insurance agency.

The traditional employer-provided pension system is in trouble, and Congress is right to be considering reforms that would prevent defaults, or at least mitigate them, while shoring up federal pension insurance. Unfortunately, the bills that have emerged from the reform effort have serious weaknesses that would undercut those worthy goals, and in some cases could make things worse.

It's not surprising that the Times hasn't, in recent years, seen fit to address the looming Social Security shortfall -- one that will make bailing out the federal pension insurance agency look like chump change -- after all, there's been no Democrat plan to endorse. Yet the coming demographic shift in Social Security is a far larger problem by several orders of magnitude.