Here's something else for the baby boom generation to worry about, besides aches and pains. Remember those old student loans? You have to pay them back. Otherwise, the government can trim your Social Security checks to get its money.

This was the upshot of a U.S. Supreme Court decision last week. All the justices agreed, which suggested that the decision was right as a matter of law. It was certainly right as a matter of principle.

The case was brought by a retired postal worker, James Lockhart, who owed $87,000 in federally insured student loans from the 1980s. After he reached 65, the Treasury Department started to withhold money from his Social Security disability check. He ended up having to pay $93 a month, or 15 percent of his benefits.

The lawsuit that he brought turned on complicated technical arguments concerning competing statutes.

The Social Security Act had exempted benefits from attachment or legal process -- and it stated that future legislation would have to make specific reference to a provision of the law to overturn this. Additionally, in 1982, another statute set a time limit of 10 years for collecting debt -- and Mr. Lockhart owed his loans longer than that.

Unfortunately for him and many others in a similar situation, subsequent laws removed the 10-year limit on certain loans and permitted the government to recover payments due through Social Security.

One question for the court was whether the later legislation met the specific reference requirement to amend the Social Security Act. The justices had no trouble in finding that it did .

Mr. Lockhart's lawyer, Brian Wolfman, did not have precise statistics, but he said there were "thousands and thousands of people like my client who are old and sick and now they are going to have 15 percent of their income taken."

As pathetic as this sounds, Congress shouldn't take it as a siren song to give relief to people who neglected to pay their student loans before they became old. If this suit had succeeded, the many thousands of Americans who dutifully paid off their student loans over the years would have been turned into chumps.