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

To: TigerPaw who wrote (217645)	2/7/2005 8:49:39 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572713

The fund and it's accruing interest is pretty close to the expected extra expense of the baby boom retirement. All the interest paid in to the fund also has to come from the government. Its a little like might right pocket paying interest to my left. Sure the fund will be depleated as designed, but by then the number of retirees will have fallen and the number of workers risen. It will likely be depleted before the baby boom is past, even if not quite as soon as Bush projects. Also the baby boom isn't the only problem. The general trend is still against social security being viable for the long term without change. As long as people keep living longer but the retirement age doesn't change (other than the planned one time change to 67) social security will trend towards insolvency. The baby boomers distort the picture by being a bigger factor for awhile then the underlying trend. 1st they made social security work better by having so many workers around, later they will make it less solvent by drawing a lot of money from it, then later still they will die off and no longer be withdrawing money. All of these changes are larger, during the years that they are happening, then the changes brought about by the overall trend. There will also be other changes around the trend caused by demographics, but such changes (at different times) work in both directions. They can overwhelm the trend for a time but it will reassert itself eventually and the trend isn't good for social security. For that matter we probably don't have to wait for the trend to reassert itself to get major problems. The baby boomers retirement will itself cause major problems, even in the unlikely event that it doesn't exhaust the so called trust fund. Tim