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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (211833)	11/16/2004 7:37:37 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573433

re: At all times the social security administration is taking on liabilities faster than it is taking on assets. Also the net workers per retiree number has been declining and will decline even faster as the baby boomers retire. When the baby boomers star dying off you might see a slight to moderate increase before the resumption of the long term trend. People are living longer and we aren't having bunches of kids anymore. Even if the fertility rate is currently "the highest it has been since 1971, it isn't a lot higher than either the 1971 figure or the amount required to replace the population (not counting immigration). And the fertility rate is far below what it was in the the first few decades after social security started. From your own link you can see that over the last 40 years the population has increased 57% in the last 40 years but is predicted to only go up 15% in the next 40). In the mean time the retirement age is barely budging, moving from 65 to 67 over a decades. The net effect is that the number of people working to support each retiree has gone from dozens of workers decades ago to about 3.4 in 2001 to an estimated 2.1 in 2030. There is no reason to think that the fertility rate will go up at that point, or that the population will not continue to age (even when the baby boomers die off any possible reduction of average age will be a blip in the longer term trend that we are getting older); so you could easily have less than 2 workers to retiree in my lifetime. First there is so much crap from both sides that it's impossible to determine the fiscal health of SS. The demographics, immigration, the laws regarding immigration, wage levels, GDP, inflation, the value of the dollar... anything could influence the numbers. But as was stated before (if you believe it) 1/3 of Bush extended tax cut could "save" SS. Why not? Is it bad to provide a safety net to seniors? John