Maybe One by Bill McKibben

Author:Bill McKibben
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Neither of my parents works any longer at a regular job. But my father just wrote his first book, a history of the Gillette Corporation published by the Harvard Business School Press. He’s making money, as well as spreading ideas that will help others make money. And my mother tutors new arrivals to this country from eastern Europe and Southeast Asia; because they speak better English, they presumably make better money. Neither of my parents is ill, and neither to my knowledge has taken up serious crime to fill the hours left free by retirement. It is, in other words, difficult to calculate the extent to which they’ve become economic burdens; certainly, they are generous to their children and grandchildren. It’s true that they may eventually require costly medical care, but as demographers Lincoln and Alice Day point out, it’s not completely fair to attribute the cost of that care to an aging population. It’s not growing old that’s so expensive, their data show; it’s dying. Since 85 percent of Americans now die after sixty-five, “this concentrates the costs of dying within old age and makes the young and middle-aged appear to be less of a financial drain.” 25 It is, in other words, something of a statistical phantom.

But there is one thing that is beyond debate, both about my parents and about the elderly as a whole. Every month the government sends them checks. And as a population ages, there are going to be more and more of those checks arriving in mailboxes, and fewer and fewer people paying the payroll taxes that support them. If it’s relatively impossible to calculate the costs of aging, it’s relatively simple to calculate the costs of Social Security. Easy and a little frightening.

• • •

If you don’t count payments on the national debt, half the federal budget goes to the elderly, a proportion that would rise to 100 percent sometime in the next century if the retirement laws remain unchanged. 26 Abroad, the situation is much the same—most nations would need a payroll tax increase of 15 to 20 percent to make their pension funds solvent. 27 Numbers like those have alarmed all sorts of commentators: these unfunded obligations are “an economic iceberg,” posing “the greatest challenge to the United States in its history.” 28 Even “Draconian budget cuts” offer “only a small amount of breathing room.” 29 And by reducing the birthrate my proposals would add—if only a little—to this dilemma.

It’s one of those crises that you can see coming a long ways away and that we so far seem powerless to stop. In part that’s because the math is arcane and a little dull. (Though not to everyone. Former Commerce Secretary Peterson, in his manifesto on the subject, relates that “recently my fellow Nebraskan Warren Buffett shared with me his delightful tale of the Static Islanders, a small, isolated, and rapidly aging society.” This delightful legend continues for several pages as the Static Islanders go about growing their rice and

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