OH NOES! SOCIAL SECURITY IS BROKE AGAIN

by Dale Coberly

OH NOES!

SOCIAL SECURITY IS BROKE AGAIN AND

WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!

BECAUSE…  BECAUSE…

BECAUSE WE’RE ALL GOING TO LIVE FOREVER

A couple of public spirited citizens have taken some of their Own Time to warn us that Social Security is (taken from last January) “worse than you think.”

They take their cue from that great humanitarian and patriot, Peter G Peterson, who has donated a Billion Dollars of His Own Money to his tax free charitable and educationable organization to warn the People that Social Security is going to kill them, and burden their children with staggering burdens,  and, well, I digress..

These two professors want us to know that the Social Security Trustees are using an outmoded procedure to forecast life expectancies a hundred years from now. Why, they say, we have a New Statistical Procedure that shows that since people are all going to live to be… ah…. older than they are now…  Social Security will GO BROKE, and we need to do something about it.  NOW.

Like raise the retirement age.  And anyway, “new research [is] suggesting that RETIREMENT ITSELF…MAY REDUCE LIFE EXPECTANCY”!

Well, we all know Statistics never lie.  And that the average reader is well equipped to evaluate claims based on statistics.  And in any case if Statistics shows us SOMETHING BAD IS GOING TO HAPPEN in a hundred years unless we DO something about it RIGHT NOW,  we better do it.  And hurry.  Especially if it’s something Peter G. Peterson has been telling us we need to do right now for the last thirty years.

Or we could just wait and see if we really are going to be living longer and staying strong and happy and loving our jobs.  And make adjustments as they seem reasonable… such as raising the payroll tax one tenth of a percent at a time if people decide they’d rather pay for their own retirement so they can retire “young” enough to enjoy life without working for the boss..

Meanwhile, there is this to consider:

50 Is the New 65: Older Americans Are Getting Booted from Their Jobs — and Denied New Opportunities