Don’t worry about losing your Social Security benefits in 2040 or 2050. Three quarters of a million American citizens are already losing theirs.

Every month, the Social Security Administration (SSA) either mails off or direct-deposits payments to American retirees living overseas. Apparently, more SSA checks are sent to Polish-American recipients in Warsaw, Poland than any city in the world except Chicago. Huge numbers of foreign-born Americans retire back to their country of origin after a working life in the United States. Hundreds of thousand of others choose to live in countries where the cost of living affords them (or used to) a sustainable lifestyle.

And all of them are being skinned.

Consider someone who retired to the Czech Republic, the former Czechoslovakia, thinking he could make it there on his Social Security. Born in America, a series of late-life reversals left him without savings or a private pension. He came to realize that George Bush didn’t believe in those kinds of possibilities, but then he didn’t have lifelong access to George's family bail-outs either.

As Rumsfeld would say, stuff happens. Not to everyone, but stuff happens occasionally to more ordinary folks.

What our intrepid retiree didn’t plan, was Bush following him to Europe to take away half of what little the government promised to pay him--about a grand a month. That’s just about the average, by the way. $1,000 will make a car payment in America or maybe pay the rent, but there won’t be much left for food. And medicine? Forget it.

Which is one of the major reasons Americans are driven from their own country in their old age. With an income at half the poverty level, who can afford to stay home? Everyone knows (god knows they've been told often enough) not to depend on Social Security as an only source of retirement income, but sometimes stuff does indeed happen.

To get down to the nitty as well as the gritty, a retiree moving to Prague just at the end of the Clinton administration found the dollar was convertible to 42 Czech crowns. Renting a flat in Prague, if you were careful, cost about 10,000 crowns--$238 bucks a month. Dinner out could be had for $4 and that included a glass of house wine and a tip. A movie was $1.25, an unlimited tram/metro pass for a whole year cost $60 and walking the incredibly beautiful streets of one of Europe’s most famous and historic cities was not only safe, but cost not a dime.

You could live well on a grand a month, travel a bit and never worry about making it.

It will come as a shock to most Americans who don’t venture outside the country, but all is not well with the dollar abroad. It still buys 30% of a Big Mac or a Starbucks coffee of the day in America, but it’s worth 19 crowns in Prague, 70% of a euro and less than half a British pound. Our good old American buck, that used to be the standard of the world and its most sought-after currency, is as broken as our military.

Alan Greenspan thinks it will be okay. Alan didn't see the dotcom bubble or sub-prime mortgages as a problem either. He cheer-led the tax breaks and now writes that he regrets them. Nice timing, Alan.

During six years in Prague, Czech prices have gone up about 20% (a moderate 3% annual increase) and the dollar has dropped by half, while Alan wasn't looking. The combination of those circumstances have boosted the $238 flat to $631, the $4 dinner to $10.60, a movie to $3.30 and a yearly tram pass to $159. Suddenly travel is out of the question and those casual stops at the bookstore are a thing of the past.

Make a quick note of what shape your family finances would be in if, during the past six years, everything you need to pay for had increased by over two and a half times. You might want to take George and Alan out to the woodshed.

That’s what’s happened outside the country. That’s why travel agents warn you to get ready for $400 hotel rooms in Europe, $6.50 a gallon for gas and (heaven forbid you need it) $9 a quart for oil. Nine bucks a quart!

We don't talk about how this happened in America, because we mostly don't know that it happened. But we began this little trip down Ruination Lane by giving $2.5 trillion to the already unconscionably rich in tax breaks. It didn’t matter, because Starbucks coffee was still $3.50. Then we blew another $1 trillion (well on its way to $2 trillion) for the Iraq thing, without raising anybody's taxes to pay for it. But again it didn’t show up on the public’s radar because Big Macs still cost pretty much the same and someone else’s kid was being called up—and called up—and called up.

Who knew? I'm coming to that.

A funny thing happened on Wall Street, where they don’t eat many Big Macs (the same cannot be said of Starbucks). The guys who make their hundreds of millions (and get tax breaks on them) were all selling the dollar short—that’s street-speak for betting it was on the way down—and down is where it went.

America had become the world’s profligate uncle, (adjective) recklessly wasteful; unrestrained by convention or morality

Uncle Sam was buying like a drunken sailor buys drinks and he wasn’t shoving any cash across the bar, he kept reaching for over-limit credit cards. Four or five trillion ‘on the cuff’ in a country that used to make stuff and didn’t any more. Four or five trillion by an administration that claimed to be fiscally conservative. Conserve, (adjective) keep in safety and protect from harm, decay, loss, or destruction; use cautiously and frugally

Profligacy is like that. Recklessness and money woes tend to encourage one another. Bush is a reformed drunk. Did he fall off the wagon while on the country's business, or what?

The prudent man (and America used to be prudent) earns money, puts some away, invests in equipment, builds a better mousetrap and spends years working his way up through Chevrolets and Buicks until he ventures into a Cadillac.

Even then, he tends not to be smug about it.

That portion of the world that believed in us has shrunk like a cheap sweater. To a large extent, the Soviet Union kept us honest, but they’re not there any more and we’re intoxicated with money these days—other people’s money. Personal debt in America is out of control, with too many carrying four or five maxed-out credit cards.

Our profligate uncle raised profligate kids and the financial world isn’t answering the phone as often as they once did. An American dollar worth half what it was six years ago.

Everything in America worth half what it was six years ago.

Not true? Explain Chrysler selling for $7 billion? Show me how Ford and GM came to find themselves on the ropes? Tell me why our airlines are bankrupt and our bridges falling into the Mississippi, while we’re unable to rebuild a city hit by a frigging hurricane? How does it happen our schools are gone to hell, prisons full to bursting, 50 million without health insurance. We have a sinking middle class, a wall to keep Mexicans out and you think the world’s judgment of us is not true?

The last to recognize a society in shambles is the society itself—Americans in America.

It may be that the first to know are Americans outside America—they’ve seen their native currency through desperately clear eyes. And, to paraphrase the commentary about Maine as a bellwether state,

“as the currency goes, so goes the nation.”