Re: Mitt Romney: A very big gamble for the GOP

"Spender" <Spender@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:r269i7h0hg0mr74ifltktii61rde0aprbj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:11:09 -0500, "RichL" <rpleavitt@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Spender" <Spender@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:fg58i71alpg81v33piv7mavui0b1ikn0n1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Are you suggesting that Social Security was an utter failure before 1980?

Nope. I'm suggesting that the "work 'em 'til they drop" model is a bit
archaic.

Now you are suggesting that 65 year old Americans are generally "ready to
drop"? The AARP - while adoring your love for the Social Security system
- might take issue with that.

Let's not be disingenuous now, I was talking about your suggestion that 80 should be the retirement age, not 65.

Besides, a lot of the increase in life expectancy was due to decreases in
accidental or otherwise "premature" deaths.

The two largest factors in the increase of the life expectancy during the
20th century are sanitation and antibiotics. I haven't seen any proof
that the rate of accidents is appreciably different now than it was in the
50's. Though some types of accidents have changed based on demographics.
Far fewer children killed on farms now, because there are fewer family
farms.

Well, you've got far fewer people working in dangerous jobs these days, and work standards in those jobs have improved tremendously from 1950 to present. You can thank Uncle Sam for that, and unions as well. Just to single out one example, look at coal mining:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Coal_mining_disasters

And once again, there's the issue of infant mortality, which as it turns out dropped by more than a factor of 4 in the US from 1950 to 2003:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0779935.html

These deaths of course are folded into life expectancy calculations, but of course they have no bearing on whether a 60-year-old can work until he's 80.

People are living far healthier lives on average now. And they tend to
have much healthier senior years. You can gauge that by health care
expenditures. On average the greatest expenditures are in the last two
years of life.

In 1950, a man who had reached 58 years of age but who was otherwise in
decent health was capable of holding down a full-time job, on average.

And would likely be dead before reaching retirement age. That isn't my
doing. That is the way the system was created.

Really? You've looked at actuarial tables to see what the likelihood of a 58-year-old in 1950 reaching age 65?

In 2010, on average, an eighty-year old is not. Of course a lot depends on
the nature of the job. I could probably work until I'm 75; my job isn't
demanding physically. But I wouldn't expect the same of a guy who's been
doing construction work all his life. Some jobs simply exact a physical
toll.

People change jobs more than ever now. The days of a single life-long job
are long gone. Very few people can expect to walk out of high school onto
a factory floor and spend the next 47 years there.

Nope, but can a guy who's worked in construction become a systems analyst at age 40? Not impossible, I grant you, but a stretch on average. People working blue-collar jobs tend to stay in blue-collar jobs, even if it's not the same one.

As I said in another post, I'm not glued to the age 65 retirement. I'd
probably go for 70 now, with gradual increases in the future. But we've
gotta be smart about this. "Life expectancy" as commonly understood is the
wrong measure; it includes, for example, infant mortality, the reduction in
which accounts for much of the increase you mention. It has little bearing
on the expected life span of a man who has already made it to age 60. You
need to look at *conditional* life expectancies, that is, how long is a
person expected to live given that he/she has reached a certain age.

I did do that. When they first created Social Security it was based on
funding the average number of years a person was likely to survive after
retirement, and retirement was long after the average life expectancy.
Now both factors have increased. Far more people make it to age 65 *and*
they live more years past age 65 than did retirees in 1950.

I'm not disagreeing, I'm just saying 80 is rather extreme.

In other words, the system was designed for catastrophic cases of those
who outlived their friends, not for everybody. There were about 16.5
workers per Social Security recipient back in 1950. Now the ratio is
about 2 to 1.

Yup, the system has changed from the original intent. Because people wanted that.

And that 2:1 ratio is partly a result of the baby boom. It's gonna get worse before it gets better.

That isn't going to work. Since it is a Ponzi scheme - paying current
recipients from the contributions of current workers - it can't survive.
Not unless today's workers start having boatloads of children.

That's plainly illogical. If the ratio of retired to current workers kept increasing without limit, you might have a point. But actual data on expected age ratios doesn't support that hypothesis. Even if birth rates don't increase, the ratio approaches a steady state. And with *reasonable* increases in age limits, the ratio will decrease.

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