Replies to post #25182 on Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[wactuary]

I've been lurking for a while, and now have something perhaps useful to contribute:

The aging projections for the US and world population are based on fairly sophisticated assumptions and methods. It is quite clear that that unless the trends of the past 100 years somehow reverse themselves, the world will be much grayer in 20 years than it is today. Many experts in fact believe that the US Social Security reports are too optomistic, and that the dependency ratio (number of retirees divided by number of workers) will be go up even faster than the government projects.

This means that the Social Security trust fund will more likely than not run out of money much faster than the government says, and that major changes to the system will be required to set it right. For example, those of you younger than 40 may not be able to get full Social Security benefits until you reach age 70, and benefits payable before that age will be reduced even more than under current law.

Here's a website that contians a lot of current research on gloabel aging.

http://www.csis.org/gai/pubs_subject.htm

[Lane Hall-Witt]

I didn't know that "people die". Are you sure about that?

Of course, I don't plan on dying myself, but that's what I hear about all the rest--. <GGG>

Sorry if I took what you intended to be a fairly straightforward point and made an overblown issue of it. I see your point about the raw population numbers. I guess it could be seen as surprising, given how much press the Boomer "time bomb" has received over the years.

Tax hikes are always a bummer, of course, but all in all we fared pretty well in the 1980s, running up the Federal debt from $0.8451 trillion on 31 December 1979 to $2.8574 trillion on 29 September 1989. $2 trillion is quite a bit of "free" money that the politicians in the 1980s are never going to be accountable for. Reagan, Bush, Democratic-controlled Congress: the whole lot of them. Not that it's really "free" in the end, of course, as we'll learn when the markets stop playing the "rollover" game with our publicly held debt. The mid-2010s could be the time when the music stops: if we're in deficit on the core budget, we'll be borrowing for that, and in addition the government will have to borrow from the public to redeem U.S. Treasuries that are held by the Social Security Trust and various other government trust funds -- so we'll be asking the financial markets not only to support operating overdrafts, but also to cover debt that the government owes itself through the system of "intragovernmental transfers" that has proliferated during the past couple of decades.

As of 11 September 2002, the Federal debt stood at $6,212,731,396,360.16.

Well, I certainly didn't mean to launch into a rant, but I appreciated learning a bit about where you were coming from and now have gone on a bit too much in showing where I'm coming from.

Thanks for making me think, too; I always enjoy these kinds of macro discussions.

Lane