k wrote:
Nothing will be done, and my generation will be left holding the bag. When I am an old man there will be tens or hundreds of thousands of people my age who are functionally homeless. Having lots of kids is beginning to sound like a good idea.

[ That may work, I guess. We're pretty screwed in this country, in a lot of unfortunate ways. -k]

Actually, that's pretty much the best solution. Now if everyone would do it, we'd be fine. The baby boomer generation will consume every resource as they age and pass on. There are not enough workers coming into the system to replenish those resources for those consuming them in retirement.

This is a worldwide phenomenon, not just US or Western. It's much worse for other countries. Japan and Germany currently have negative population growth and their worker to retiree ratio is less than one and will be less than .5 inside of 10 years. You're talking about some SERIOUS GDP changes for those nations if they don't do something to change that curve.

The fait accompli from the Bush administration would've been to shift retirement benefits from SS to private accounts. It would've exacerbated the result, which would've been that only people who had maintained their 401k's and made greater than average wages would've been able to retire 'comfortably'. Everyone else is screwed. There won't be any social safety nets because we'll be upto our eyeballs in debt, war funding, and the economy will likely be heavily dependent on foreign labor (meaning less lower paying jobs here in the US). Out of all of this though, the health care crisis will be worse. It will collapse on itself unless the system radically changes. It's not set up to handle anything like this.

Hopefully, I'll be living somewhere else.

RE: Why you'll never retire...