By Steve Winn, Kansas City Star Editorial Board

Each year the trustees for Social Security and Medicare provide a frightening look at the financial challenges the country faces as its population ages.

And each year the warning is widely ignored, in part because many people focus on the wrong numbers in the trustees' report.

The new forecast released Tuesday, for example, indicates that the so-called "trust fund" for Social Security will be depleted by 2041. That sounds comfortably distant.

But this isn't a pile of cash sitting in the basement of the U.S. Treasury. It is a pile of IOUs that taxpayers and today's young people will eventually need to start paying off. And they will have to start doing that long before 2041.

That won't be easy, particularly with all the new debt that the government has been running up in the last few years.

The key date to focus on with Social Security is actually much closer than 2041. It is 2017, when the Social Security payroll tax will no longer bring in enough money to pay all of the promised benefits.

At that point the government will have to either cut benefits or find some extra money somewhere. Tax increases? Drastic cuts in other federal programs?

Medicare is in even worse shape. The program as a whole is already in the red, draining money from general tax revenues and helping to boost the federal debt.

The new trustees' report, however, shows that the Medicare situation will rapidly worsen.

The really depressing thing is that the country is already running up debt when the huge Baby Boom generation has just started to retire in large numbers. A few years out and we'll really be in trouble.

Social Security and Medicare should have been fixed a long time ago. The next president and Congress will have to focus on reforming the programs.

And because we've waited so long, the changes are guaranteed to be painful.

Steve Winn is the deputy editorial page editor of The Kansas City Star.