Celebrities plan their legacies

Author ("Thank You for Smoking," "Boomsday")

Bankrate: As you point out in "Boomsday," Social Security is surely headed for a major adjustment when the ratio of working to retired Americans goes from 15-to-1 to 2-to-1.

Christopher Buckley: Consider the economic ramifications of that, and also the cultural ramifications of having 77 million seniors. Of course, it won't happen all at once. Unless certain things are done, it's going to have calamitous economic ramifications for the poor dears following us who have to pay for all this. The kernel of anger in the book is the idea that we try to leave the world better off for the next generation -- that would be the American ideal, you work hard to provide for the next generation -- but what we're actually doing is writing checks on their bank accounts. At some point, there's going to be a reckoning, and do we trust the government to make correct decisions?