(no groans allowed)

It’s just like the population explosion, or global warming, or the resource shortage. They’re all too far in the future to worry about now. The conservatives never worry about them. The free market will come up with some solution to the problem in the future.

That’s why both America (and Europe) encouraged immigration when their birth rates fell, to promote future economic growth. Japan didn’t, and look what happened to them.

Wild in the Streets

It’s simply not true. Social Security benefits make up about half my retirement income (and this includes my wife’s SS benefits). We could not live on SS alone, neither could either one of us if one died before the other, although many of those in my retirement community do. It is not a pretty sight as far as my neighbors are concerned. They are barely hanging on, and going through their savings, if they have any left after the Bush stock market shenanigans, neglecting home maintenance, nutrition, and their medical expenses.

Although the cost of maintaining this program (not to mention the scandalous way its assets have been stolen by both parties) is certainly a legitimate concern, no one seems to be so concerned about the expense of getting rid of it. The 50 million or so boomers now queuing up for benefits will still have to live and pay their bills, who will do that? The economy is counting on them buying stuff, it creates jobs and tax revenue, remember? It will come from somewhere, and it will cost money. If not, old people will die, it’s that simple. And these deaths will not all be greedy, self-indulgent boomers, ghetto types, welfare queens or Manuel Labor and his little brown mamacita. They will be everybody’s mom and pop, and grandma and grandpa. And they are not deadbeat freeloaders, they paid for their Social security, remember? They followed the rules. That’s why they are called ‘entitlements’.

And of course, the suddenly pensionless elderly will not just be able to go back to work. Young, healthy, skilled workers can’t find jobs, what makes you think the elderly will? Of course, flooding the job market with desperate old people (many of them with education, skills and experience)in dire economic straits will have one very beneficial economic result: it will drive salaries way down, keep all people with jobs docile and compliant, terrified of displeasing their bosses, and it will finish off the unions once and for all. And if you’re waiting for the elimination of entitlement withholding to suddenly be converted to higher salaries and renewed corporate investment in new jobs you’re a fool. You’re also a fool if you expect anyone else to believe it either. Yeah, follow the money. The trail always leads to the same place, don’t it?

There is no way any politician, left or right, will ever gut the Social Security system, not as long as all those old people vote as a bloc (and there is nothing like the prospect of poverty and starvation to motivate and organize them). Also voting with them will be their children, who will be in no hurry to suddenly be faced with gramps or granny moving in (or as is rapidly becoming the case), moving out; in many cases these days, it is the young who are relying on their retired relatives for financial support or a roof over their heads.

To get around this, the enemies of the entitlement programs have been systematically spreading the rumor that young people “will never get to receive their share” after all those greedy old farts plunder the young’s contributions. But in order to do this, it has become necessary to fight every reform or restructuring that will preserve the system, keeping it solvent at least until the demographic bulge dies a natural death from old age. (Yes, this SS “crisis” is temporary, eventually the system will start showing a profit). However, letting it go broke by starving it of witholding or refusing to allow any of the other reforms that might save it will accomplish the same result. And they will encourage boosts in benefits to help bring about that crisis even faster and to buy the aquiescence of the elderly voter.

The enemies of the system will do everything they can to fight changes to it that will allow it to continue for future generations, they see the ‘privatization’ of the system as a business opportunity (which is Arabic for putting it in the stock market so they can plunder it), and you can count on them doing the same to that nest egg as they did to the real estate scam they foisted on the homeowning class, or the gasoline scam they foisted on the V8 and SUV drivers of America.

The seniors will never vote for it, they know better, but by engineering (and exaggerating) enough threats to the long-term viability of the system they can provoke enough inter-generational conflict to get the under-55 cohort to demand it from their legislators, even if it takes a constitutional amendment. Meanwhile, the over-55 group (who are really the greatest stress on the system) will be reassured that “reforms will never affect them”. Divide and conquer, it worked for Caesar, class warfare, it worked for Lenin. And if that doesn’t work, they can always round us up into camps. I can see it now: Soylent Gray.