Don't we need more workers here anyway?
Posted by The Pixiest (Member # 1863) on :
Don't we have an unemployment problem?
Social Security: Easy as taking candy from a baby.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Get into a nuclear war, making sure to get your enemy to target Florida where all the retirees are.
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
We'd have to give Icarus, Chris, Zan, Ela, JaneX, Narrativium, Rakeesh and a few others fair warning, though.
Actually, unemployment is fairly low and the immigrants I'm talking about would be taking the jobs we have a hard time filling.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
What most people are completely overlooking when they talk about Social Security reform is that retirees (like the rest of us) don't need money -- they need goods and services. It won't matter how much money people have when they retire if there aren't enough people working to provide the goods and services they need.
The social security "problem" exists because people are having fewer and fewer children. If Baby Boomers had as many children as their parents, there would be other problems but we would have plenty of workers paying into social security and working to provide the good and services retirees need.
The simple fact of conservation of matter and energy means that the whatever segment of society works to produce goods and services, must produce enough goods and services for the non-working segment of society. If they don't, providing more money to the non-workers will simply make the money worth less (ie it will cause inflation).
To solve the problem we must either increase the productivity of the workers so that the good and services people need can be provided with a smaller fraction of the people working or increase the ratios of workers to retirees.
The later could be done by increasing the immigration of young workers, but for that to happen America has to offer opportunities that make it worth while to come here and support our retirees.
[ February 16, 2005, 08:21 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]