CEG\'er
Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 443 |
Originally posted by caltour2:
The Bush administration and the financial industry have alarmed everyone by claiming that Social Security is "going broke", but it's just not true. Sure, if left on its present course, Social Security would eventually run a deficit and have to dip into principal. This is due to the demographic bubble of retiring baby boomers. We just need to make a few modest adjustments to payouts and withholdings, and the system will remain solvent.
Economic Policy Institute: Social Security is not going broke.
AARP says social security is not going broke.
Bush's wealthy pals want to scare everyone's pants off about Social Security so they can cash in on the privatization of our retirement. Can't you see that Big Money wants to get its hands on the largest nest egg in the world, and make their commissions on it and skim some of it off the top?
This has nothing to do with Bush or the current administration. Like I said, it's simple math. Below is a copy/paste from a previous thread here on immigration reform, but it applies/explains some of what I was alluding to, and how important our immigration reform will be in respect to socsec/social programs. The fact is that we tend to isolate issues such as socsec, healthcare, immigration, etc., into separate discussions, however from a demographics perspective, they are intimately related and more people need to realize this fact:
The bottom line is that demography is destiny. We can make realistic projections of how many people will be over 60 in twenty years by looking at how many people are over 40 today. We can project birth and death rates accurately since they change slowly over time. What we see is an aging population in Europe, Japan, and America, and a slowdown in the birth rates almost universally across the globe. These facts will produce huge changes from an economic perspective that cannot be avoided. Japan and Europe are farther along from an aging population perspective and are currently starting to have to deal with some of the huge economic problems that result from this fact of life, so we'd be smart to sit up and watch closely so that we can do whatever we have to do to offset as much of the inevitable social policy problems as is possible.
From a socsec perspective, the simple fact is that our current social policy must change. A pay-as-you-go type retirement system will become impossible to maintain as our population ages coupled with a low birthrate. Eventually, there will be less than one worker per retired person, this is already a problem that some European nations are starting to have to confront. Besides the huge problem of who will pay for retirement benies, there is the problem of who will be available to care for the elderly. There simply will not be enough workers without massive immigration in many countries. The U.S. has a bit of a reprieve compared to Japan and Europe, so we'd be wise to wake up and start to deal with these issues now.
Though socsec can be fixed, the real problem is the Medicaire/Medicaid and healthcare systems. I missed a zero in my earlier post. It is a reported 40 trillion deficit to pay for Medicare as the Baby Boomers retire my friends. As I said before, the options are not pretty, massive tax hikes or significant benefit cuts, massive cuts in both discretionary as well as non-discretionary spending, or a combination thereof.
The overall point here is that a nation whose population is not growing and is not increasing it's tax base and economic base will not continue to thrive. The U.S. needs it's immigrants, given our birthrate has now fallen below the sustaining population rate of 2.1. Without immigration our socsec and Medicare problems are greatly increased, perhaps to the breaking point. Our problems could eventually become as large as Europe's, which will actually see a population decline of as much as one hundred million over the next several decades. The U.S. should be doing everything it can to increase immigration of the right kind (read legal immigration). Our current policy is insufficient and ill informed, and needs change, but at least it allows for one million legal immigrants per year (versus only 360,000 across all of Europe as a comparison). If we're smart, we'd be doing everything we can to get young, educated people to come to the U.S., in addition to educating our own children better.
For all the talk about energy resources, we will one day truly realize that young people are the true natural and limited resource. Yes, demography is destiny. Demographics cannot be legislated against. Demonstrations will not change their reality. These trends are going to force profound changes on our countries and cultures, as well as our economies. We must be careful how we proceed with immigration reform as a result of these eventual realities.
Last edited by cjbaldw; 04/09/06 12:01 AM.
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