Let's say you're under 40. That means you're at the young end of the baby boom generation or maybe in the baby bust generation that followed.
Then the chances are you believe that the Social Security system is a bum deal. Here you are, paying 6.2% of your wages so that today's retirees can drive their Winnebagos all over creation. By the time you retire, you figure you'll be lucky to afford an oil change with what the program has left for you.
Well, if it's any consolation, you have a lot of company all around the world. The United States is not the only country with a baby boom generation on the brink of retirement, poised to sock the workers who will be supporting them.
In fact, compared with most other "rich" countries, the U.S. Social Security system is the Rock of Gibraltar. Experts estimate that it should be able to pay its promised benefits in full until 2032, when it will exhaust the surplus it has been building since the program was started during the Great Depression. And even then it will still be taking in enough revenue from the payroll tax to cover 75% of promised benefits.
President Clinton says he will dedicate the last two years of his administration to shoring up the system for all time. That sounds good in principle; in practice, it probably means raising somebody's taxes or reducing somebody's benefits--in short, taking political risk.
So rather than offer his own plan for repairs, Clinton will convene a panel of experts and politicians at a Washington hotel Tuesday and in private sessions at the White House on Wednesday to begin laying out the options.
The president will have to rescue Social Security from the same historic forces that are inexorably driving up the resources devoted by the world's rich societies to their elderly.
The worldwide baby boom in the aftermath of World War II was followed in the world's industrial countries by a baby bust of equally extreme proportions. This is happening just as the miracles of modern medicine will make the baby boom generation the longest-lived in history.
What's more, most industrial countries are extraordinarily indulgent toward their elderly, who wield even more political clout overseas than they do in the United States.
Working together, these forces are leaving relatively few workers to pick up the tab for progressively more comfortable lifestyles for vastly increased numbers of retirees.
