How about this - start creating a system to replace the system that creates deficits..
<rant/on>The system is not the problem, demographic trends are the culprit.
And we are very fortunate in that regard because Japan and most Western European countries have lower birth rates than we do yet provide more bountiful benefits on the whole than we do. These benefits are granted to a growing population that is not being replaced by young people.
The math is simple, inexorable and damning. The Japanese and the Western Europeans--our traditional competitors--are getting older and are not replacing the population base which supports the elderly, not to mention national economies.
We are doing better but are not completely replacing our population. Though it seems that it will take longer to occur, if our present trends continue, we may very well eventually end up in the same boat.
Japan and Western Europe's economies are in deep long term trouble solely as a result of demographics. To make things worse, some Western Europeans try to replace their vanishing population base by importing Muslims who either refuse or have substantial difficulties in assimilating. We fortunately import a few, mostly legal and illegal Latins, who do assimilate and who do contribute productively.
The Japanese are too racist to import anyone so are committing long term economic sepukku.
The US's demographic problem is not nearly as daunting as the one the Japanese and the Europeans face. We are at least not ignoring it.
The long term solution not only to SS but to a lot of other looming problems--and I'll surely be reviled here for saying it--is to increase the taxpaying and economically active population base through internal population growth.
How?
Tax measures which provide incentives to raising families is one way. An educational push to make folks know the importance of demographics to their own economic future is another. Laws that ease the time demands that child-rearing imposes on working parents comes to mind. Maybe even mandate some sort of income distinctions--beyond income tax breaks--between parents and non-parents who perform the same job.
We need more moms (or stay-at-home dads) than we need highly educated lawyers, CPAs, social workers, and other service industry workers.
The difficulty, of course, is that education is the single best contraceptive created by man. And the promising, vibrant members of our society, those who should be procreating, are spending their time becoming sterile as a result of more education which ends at a time when for many reasons they can't or won't be willing to raise more than one child, which is deadly to national economic well-being.
It's a hell of a conundrum.
I find the debate we are having about SS phantasmagoric because of what is not said. It's clearly about demographics since better demographics will not only solve the SS problem, a growing or at least stable population will keep us from facing the terrible problems that Japan and Western Europe will face from their own lousy demographics and their utterly misguided attempts to deal with them. <rant/off> |
