One of the commonly known but often unspoken secrets of the current battle over health care reform is the fact that we are in desperate need of entitlement reform. When Social Security was first passed in the 1930’s we had 3 workers for every person going on the system while today that ratio is reversed and the numbers are headed in the wrong direction.
Indeed current stats show that the average family is producing 2.1 children which basically means a growth rate of 0% because they are just replacing themselves. Thus the future demographics are likely to be worse.
The obvious solution (aside from forced breeding) is to look at raising the entitlement age which would lower the number of people on the system while raising the number of people supporting it. But of course any mention of this brings howls of protest from the various interest groups.
Something that many of those people ignore is the fact that with lifespans increasing we would actually just be keeping pace with the original intent of the system.
Did you ever wonder, for example, why retirement age was set at 65 ?
Why not 64 or 66 or 60 ?
The answer is that the Social Security program was based on a welfare program started by Bismark in Germany during the 19th century. He started it so the more socially liberal legislators would support his more conservative military programs.
But before he proposed the system he went to a group of actuarial experts. He got them to run the numbers and determine an age low enough to sound plausable to most people yet high enough that statistically 99% of them would be dead.
That age was 65.
And indeed when Social Security began during the 1930’s, it was not that common for people to live into their 60’s or 70’s. The average lifespan as late as 1950 was 68.2 years (stats here). So the average person got 3 years worth of benefits. Even in 1980 they only got about 8-9 years. Today it is closer to 15. That kind of growth just is not going to be sustainable.
We need to look at accepting the reality of increasing life spans. It doesn’t mean 20 yrs in Boca, it means working longer because you have more time to work.