Into every generation

The paper today ran an item in the national briefs about a new White House report on Social Security:

The Bush administration said in a new report Monday that Social Security is facing a $13.6 trillion shortfall in coming years and that delaying reforms is not fair to younger workers.

The full-length AP report doesn't provide much in the way of supporting evidence for that claim of a "$13.6 trillion shortfall," except to say this number was arrived at by calculating a cumulative deficit into "the indefinite future." Apparenty, in order to come up with a sufficiently scary-sounding large number, they projected the deficit expected to arise in 2042 over the next several centuries, extending a demographic bubble (the Baby Boom) into a permanent, never-ending trend.

The Treasury report also seems to be based on the assumption that, over the next few centuries, America's population will not grow but, rather, contract.

Scary thought: What if the Bush administration knows something the rest of us don't about the next 300 years of America's future? Maybe they have some kind of top-secret, ultra-classified advance warning about a Children of Men-type plague. If the human race suddenly and mysteriously became unable to reproduce, there would be no new generation of workers to fulfill the intergenerational compact of Social Security. That might account for this $13.6 trillion figure.

It's got to be something like that, because barring some such cataclysmic event producing a massive decrease in the size of future (but not present) generations, this kind of centuries-long deficit in Social Security just isn't mathematically possible.

The Rapture, for instance. That would do it. Or a radical increase in human lifespan (110 is the new 40!). Otherwise, in a non-Rapture scenario, population growth will continue apace, demographic bubbles will work their way through the system, requiring trust funds to be established and depleted, and everlasting deficits of the sort the Treasury report describes could never occur.

But then I turned to the Health section of the paper, and suddenly it all made sense. "Transplant technologies aid aging boomers" the headline said, and the article went on to describe a somewhat disturbing array of "allografts" and "xenotransplants."

This could help to explain why the Bush administration report contradicts the trustees of the Social Security Administration, who say that the system will more than pay for itself at least through the year 2042. The trustees are operating on the assumption that eventually the baby boomers will die. The Treasury report, on the other hand, seems to be operating on the assumption (or secret government knowledge) that the boomers will never die.

That would account for a "$13.6 trillion shortfall" ever-expanding into the "indefinite future" -- a generation of retirees who continue collecting benefits forever.

But as impressive as the advance in implants and transplants might be, these still don't seem like quite enough to produce an Eternal Generation capable of bankrupting the system to the tune of $13.6 trillion. No mere medical advance could hope to do that.

So, obviously, what we're left with is vampirism.

We can only conclude, based on the figures they provide, that the Treasury Department has secret classified knowledge of a coming scourge of baby boomer vampires. This generation of Americans will begin retiring in three years and, instead of moving to Florida to play golf, or volunteering with the local library, they will become bloodsucking immortal creatures of the night, an army of the soulless undead, hiding from the sun, preying on the weak, and cashing their monthly checks throughout the unending centuries until the system racks up a deficit of $13.6 trillion.

Either that or the Bush administration is just lying about the numbers. Again.

Comments

[Rozzen]

Either that or the Bush administration is just lying about the numbers. Again.

You've forgotten a possibility, you didn't account for advancing stem-cell research !
Oh, wait.

[Rozzen]

Aha ! First post ! What with the three post a day regime we're subjected to right now I was bound to get one ! Yay ! \o/

Okay I'll go back under my bridge now.

[grenadine]

fortunately, the slayer probably won't have to worry about the lack of benefits, because most slayers die before they retire.

[Salamanda]

Buffyyyyyyyyyy! Helllllllllllp!!!

[trevor]

Anyone else here read The Coming Generational Storm by Kotlikoff? He suggests that the shortfall is closer to 40 trillion, and makes a frighteningly compelling case. Or at least, a case that would frighten me if I lived in the US. I guess I'll just stick to countries that have balanced budgets.

[the opoponax]

Dammit... I thought my parents looked a little peaked last time I was home. Also, they sure did sleep late...

I thought they were just stuck in a midlife crisis - slash - K Hole.

[Drew Habits]

O.J.!

[B-W]

Given how much conservative Christians are decrying the falling birth rate in European countries where more and more people are either having kids later or choosing not to have kids at all, I'm surprised that there wasn't more discussion to the possibility of such a decline in population in America's future. Not to say that it will be of a kind necessary to make Bush's numbers work, but the possibility of a future decline in "young" Americans isn't as ridiculous as the article makes it sound, given the European precedent (even if the conservative response to it is all out of proportion).

[Hasimir Fenring]

The low birthrate in US is offset by a higher rate of immigration than that in Western Europe, though exactly how much it is offset is debated. It makes me cringe when Old White Men complain about all the for'ners coming into Our Country taking Our Jobs.

Who do you think is going to be taxed to pay your Social Security benefits, gramps?

[Iain]

I think the $13.6 trillion figure is not recurring. That is, if you count up all the pluses and minuses out to the end of time, then it comes out $13.6 trillion in the red. Amortize that over an infinite number of years and you get ... zero.

Dean Baker has some good analysis of why the Social Security crisis isn't.

[Spalanzani]

You know, I bet Scott could use a break…

This is all too typical. You liberals support the fight against the powers of darkness only so long as it is useful for your Will to Power. You conveniently forget that the Constitution forbids vampirism and necromancy for both parties, not just Republicans. Unfortunately for you, we don’t have to choose between hating the Republican army of the undead or the Democrat army of darkness; we can hate both equally. Not that this will stop you from using the imminent vampire threat to justify oppressive government programs where you’ll confiscate our money and property at stake-point. It’s all in a day’s work for Fred Clark, Compassionate Evangelic Vampire Slayer.

[witless chum]

Isn't the Ole Perfesser planning on something similar happening? We just need one more data point and it's a trend!

[Geds]

I think I'm going to award a provisional thread win to Spalanzani...

[Salamanda]

Fred Clark, Compassionate Evangelic Vampire Slayer.

Fred, I think you need some new business cards!

[Theobald Smith]

Fred, why do you discriminate against nosferatu-Americans?

[Drak Pope]

Fred, you do not mind my calling you Fred, do you? They call you that because it is your name.

[Mark Z.]

Once we solve the "your immune system going apewire on your shiny new kidney because it smells like bacon" problem, xenotransplantation is going to rule. Yes, it's "disturbing", but, hell, organ transplants of any kind are disturbing.

[Angelika]

Actually, xenotransplantation seems like a wonderful invention. I wish it would work already. There's always this bitter part to organtransplantation that certain body parts are only available, if somebody dies.

[Becky]

As people like Dean Baker have explained repeatedly, there is no SS shortfall. There is a serious Medicare shortfall, which reflects the insane costs of our bizarre health care system. The GOP and its enablers (e.g., Samuelson) thus like to talk about the "SS and Medicare" shortfall, in order to mislead the public and the media (the latter unfortunately frequently fall for it).

[not someone else]

So, obviously, what we're left with is vampirism.

I've never been a big fan of this "compassion" thing you keep going on about, but knowledge of your existence continues to make the world a bit better of a place.

[Mary Jones]

It's got to be something like that, because barring some such cataclysmic event producing a massive decrease in the size of future (but not present) generations, this kind of centuries-long deficit in Social Security just isn't mathematically possible.

Peak oil. Definitely peak oil and the agrarian collapse. Olduvai theory? Global warming ending stable food production as we know it?

Meh, there's a perfect solution to the vampire menace--zombies. Of course, I don't know how to get rid of the zombies, but cross that bridge when you come to it.

[hapax]

Fred Clark, Compassionate Evangelic Vampire Slayer.

The Musical!

[chimera]

Hey, with all us boomers all being vampires, we won't have to worry so much about global warming ending stable food production. And we won't need quite as much in our budgets for groceries either. heh heh

[pecunium]

When it comes to vampires, if killing them was good enough for Jesus it's good enough for me.

[bad Jim]

All you heathens think eternity is something that comes for free. No, no, a thousand times no, a million, a milliard, a billion... numbers don't really run up that high.

You have to have saved up for it all your lives, and no matter how much mercy you've shown since you crawled up onto dry land from the ancient oceans, it wasn't enough. However proud you newfangled eukaryotes may be of your trendy commensal mitochondria, however ecumenical you think you are, you don't have enough in your retirement account for an afterlife.

You may have thought this pretty planet, this bright blue ball, would support you in eternity, and if it hadn't been for one or six billion surprising twists it might have done so, but at present your prospects look poor. Better luck next universe.

[Les]

Somebody on Facebook just invited me to become a vampire. Could this be related?

Other possibilities: zombies and ZOMBIE VAMPIRES

[Jesurgislac]

There are no vampires on Facebook. Too much garlic.

[Lisa in Bama]

What if the Bush administration knows something the rest of us don't about the next 300 years of America's future?
Obviously they expect the Homosexual Agenda to succeed, and we will all be boinking non-procreatively.

[twig]

Happy Stanislav Petrov Day, Fred. : )

[Geds]

Somebody on Facebook just invited me to become a vampire. Could this be related?

Nah, on Facebook you can say no. I do it all the time. To the werewolves and zombies, too...

Obviously they expect the Homosexual Agenda to succeed, and we will all be boinking non-procreatively.

Yeah, we might want to tell them that's really not going to work.

I left the fundies and haven't noticed any accompanying increase in my desire to have sex with other men. It's almost impossible to believe, but it's entirely possible that God wasn't keeping me from that. It's almost like I'm not attracted to men sexually or something.

That can't be, though. It would entirely negate the homosexual agenda!

[Jesurgislac]

I wish I had a copy of the Homosexual Agenda. Unfortunately, they only hand copies out at meetings of the Homosexual Mafia, and the date of the next meeting is only available on copies of the Homosexual Agenda...

It beats me how all these fundamentalist Christians get copies of it when I can't!

[hapax]

I wish I had a copy of the Homosexual Agenda.

Glad to be of service.

[Rozzen]

The most scathing demolishings of the anti-gay-marriage agenda I ever saw were on "this hour has 22 minutes", a Canadian fake news show.

This one is nice :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvl8PAzt194

But the two that are lost in the middle of this compilation are just great :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6QLc9r3EU8

[Jesurgislac]

1:00 p.m. Meet someone for whom you only know his waist, chest and penis size from AOL M4M chat for lunch at a hot, new restaurant. Because the maître d' recognizes you from a gay bar, you are whisked past the Christian heterosexual couples who have been waiting patiently for a table since 12:30.

2:30 p.m. "Dessert at your place." Find out, once again, people lie on AOL.

3:33 p.m. Assume complete control of the U.S., state, and local governments (in addition to other nations' governments); destroy all healthy Christian marriages; recruit all children grades Kindergarten through 12 into your amoral, filthy lifestyle; secure complete control of the media, starting with sitcoms; molest innocent children; give AIDS to as many people as you can; host a pornographic "art" exhibit at your local art museum; and turn people away from Jesus, causing them to burn forever in Hell.

4:10 p.m. Time permitting, bring about the general decline of Western Civilization and look like you are having way too much fun doing it.

4:30 p.m. Take a disco-nap to prevent facial wrinkles from the stress of world conquest and being so terribly witty.

Thank you, Hapax...

[Geds]

Man alive, them homosexuals can accomplish more in fifty-seven minutes than I possibly could in 57 Centuries. Perhaps we really should give everything up to them.

I mean, George W. Bush has been God's Man in office for nearly seven years now and hasn't done anywhere close to as much...

[Drak Pope]

Only because he hasn't flexed his muscles as much.

[Scorpio]

The only permissible uses for money are war and tax cuts! What will it take before you peasants understand that!

Hmph!

[Rozzen]

I mean, George W. Bush has been God's Man in office for nearly seven years now and hasn't done anywhere close to as much...

Have you seen the Daily Show interview with Evo Morales ? What struck me (aside from the fact that the idea of a poor, Native peasant could become leader of the country *is* pretty shocking to us rich Westerners, and that alone is pretty shocking) is Jon listing Morales' campaign promises, and then saying "you did all this in eight months" (or some similarly short time).

Was this an exaggeration, a misleading way of putting it ? Is it that Bolivia had more on its plate in the first place, kind of like the same effort will clean a greater percentage of a very messy room than a clean one ? (if that makes sense)
Or are we really missing something up here in El Norte ?

[e. nonee moose]

Or maybe there will be no jobs in America. By far the most likely scenario to explain a $136 trillion shortfall. Not joking.

[Spalanzani]

Rozzen: "Was this an exaggeration, a misleading way of putting it ? Is it that Bolivia had more on its plate in the first place, kind of like the same effort will clean a greater percentage of a very messy room than a clean one ? (if that makes sense)"

There is an adage that goes something like "Work will always expand to fill the space alloted to it." So if you have a lot of work to do in a short amount of time, you'll work very quickly to get it all done in time, but if you only have a few things to do in the same amount of time, you'll end up working at a leisurely pace and not get done any sooner. Is that the kind of thing you're thinking of?

[Drak Pope]

Also, Bolivian people have magical powers.

[Rozzen]

Is that the kind of thing you're thinking of?
Not really, though your thing might be a better explanation than mine. I was more kind of thinking that when your room is very messy it's quite easy to make a big change (just stacking up those papers lying all over your desk for example), but if it's already pretty clean your pouring effort into dusting the light bulbs, so basically the same time and effort will make a bigger change in a messy room than in a clean one.

Of course I don't know if this "principle" would apply to cleaning up a country, or by what standards the US is "cleaner" than Bolivia in the first place.
Of course I know nothing of Bolivia so that doesn't help.

Drak Pope : Also, Bolivian people have magical powers.
Ah, especially the Native American ones. That's as good an explanation as any :)
(what the English term for South American Native Americans anyway ? I would have said Inca or Maya or Aztec but I'm not sure which ones were in Bolivia)

[Jeff]

what the English term for South American Native Americans anyway ? I would have said Inca or Maya or Aztec but I'm not sure which ones were in Bolivia

Not Aztec (from Mexico) or Inca (from the Yucatan penisula, including Honduras and Belize), that's for sure. Wiki says that the Incan Empire extended into "western and south central Bolivia", but the more proper word to use might be Aymara. "Indinginous people[s]" also works.

[Rosina]

Quechua is the main group in Bolivia, and is also the main native language, and was used by the Incas. Aymara comes second.

[hapax]

I think you mean "indigenous peoples." "Indinginous" conveys to me a sort of faded dirty grey blue.

"Hello. My name is Indigenous Montoya. You killed my father's culture..."

No. There isn't any way to make that funny, is there?

[bad Jim]

Yam Windigo Montagna. YouTube'd my feather ... what, somebody already did this? Huh. Might I mention Niccolo Dolomiti? That too? Dayum.

Part of what I have to do to take care of my elderly, socially active, and cognitively impaired mother is helping her keep track of her engagements as stylishly as possible. I keep an eye out for a purse-sized pink leather-bound calendar, because if I ever spotted one I could ask, in my most stentorian voice, "SO IS THIS A HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA?"

[magistra]

Xenotransplantation has one really big problem: it's a chance going begging for diseases to jump between species. And as BSE (Mad Cow disease) and AIDS show, that kind of species jump can change a disease that's a minor problem into a killer. I've seen suggestions that recipients of xenotransplants will have to be subject to very tight regulations about what they do, but if the procedure becomes routine, some clinics/people will break the rules. So what wipes us out en masse may just be the Swine Flu Pandemic of 2040.

[Maarak]

"The Treasury report, on the other hand, seems to be operating on the assumption (or secret government knowledge) that the boomers will never die."

There just so happens to be a wonderful science fiction novel with just this premise. http://www.amazon.com/Holy-Fire-Bantam-Spectra-Book/dp/055357549X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-6221453-9960865?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190886163&sr=8-1

In the novel, which takes place in the late 21 century, the baby boomers are not only still alive, but still in control. The young (anyone below 70 or so) have become increasingly disaffected with the way society works. In the present day, wealth and positions of power are passed down to younger generations as the older one dies off. But when death can be delayed indefinitely, why would anyone willingly hand over the money and power they worked to get? While we're no where near the state of affairs in the story, my generation are already having issues moving into positions of authority as the boomers aren't letting go.

Fred doesn't seem to have any facts here either, just eye rolling. There will be a shortfall, it's some way off but it's inevitable because people are living longer than was planned for when the system was set up. When the Baby Boomers die off this effect won't stop, it will simply continue more slowly.

If nothing is done about it (and it's traditional in American politics to do nothing about hard problems until they cause outbreaks of rioting) the fund will be exhausted in the 2040s and at that point it will automatically reduce payments to retirees by 20% or so to meet its budget. If nothing were done about that, people would literally just check their account one day and find that they're only getting 80¢ for every dollar they expected and presumably for some people that means they'll lose their home. This would make them very angry indeed and presumably would cause actual riots.

So most likely something will be done, in the 2040s if not sooner. One of the options obviously is to just start paying the extra now, it's only a small shortfall, so you could just raise taxes to pay for it. A modest tax raise would pay for all this, the problem would go away. Or a cut in other large line items such as defense spending could pay for it in time, without seriously interrupting the US ability to defend itself.

Now obviously headline figures like trillions of dollars are intended to be scary, just the same as if Fred uses similar figures to show how much money has been wasted in Iraq, or spent on Republican pork, or whatever. But there is a genuine political problem here, which deserves actual debate rather than Republicans telling people that Social Security is going bankrupt or Democrats pretending everything's going to be fine as it is. Most countries seem to have concluded that if everyone's going to live longer they should work longer too, pushing legal retirement age back say 5-10 years over the next few decades. That's not popular in the US, and I've outlined some alternatives. Sticking your fingers in your ears is only an option if you're already retired and don't expect to live until 2040, or I suppose if you're a vampire and intend to spend the 2040s in a state of undeath, feeding on those made homeless by the crisis.

To give some hard figures for people who have trouble with billions and trillions of hypothetical dollars...

Over the indefinite future calculated for these reports, this represents about 3-4¢ on the dollar of American worker's taxable income. One of the few non-partisan criticisms of these already independent reports on the well-being of the system is that it would be better expressed in this "cents in the dollar" form even if that's not actually the more informative way for economists to understand it, because most people aren't economists.