February 02, 2004

76 million baby-boomers looming on the horizon and about to wreck havoc on the supplemental retirement system, Social Security.

That’s the story we hear over and over as a reason for immediate Social Security reform of some type. Since one of Alan Greenspeak’s speeches a few months ago, the number has even increased to 77 million baby boomers.

What the fear mongers never tell you is whether these figures are births “above normal.” But they certainly imply that it is when they speak of hordes of people about to begin retirement and draining the Social Security insurance program every worker in America has been contributing towards and where they each already have a “personal account.”.

The truth is that there were births above the normal rate between 1946 and 1965 after sixteen million lusty servicemen and women returned from the many theaters of World War II and began having children during the primary reproductive ages of their soul mates. But the real figure of births above normal is more like seven or eight million, something Social Security can handle without breaking a sweat.

In other words, if there had been no World War II or we had not become involved in it, if our young soldiers had merely stayed at home, there would have been a 68 or 69 million increase in the population anyway, including immigrants.

Personally, I think Clinton's speech writers wrote this into his speech as 7.6 million baby boomers and he missed the decimal point.

Regardless, the word merchants of the Fourth Estate immediately picked up on this warning and have been scaring the hell out of everyone since the Clinton speech. None of them ever bother to ask if these are births above normal.

If you want something real to worry about, it’s the people who have been retiring who were born between 1930 and 1940 when, due to the Great Depression, the American population increase dropped in half. Reproductive rates didn’t return to normal until 1939 or 1940, just before five years of war broke out.

In other words, when it comes to payouts the Social Security system has had it easy until recently. Now 70 years old, the supplemental retirement program is paying benefits to 47 million retired and disabled workers. Given the option of retiring at 62 with partial benefits, we are already three to five years into the workers born in 1940 and thereafter.

And still, Social Security produced a $71 billion excess last year, fiscal 2004. A surplus that the federal government stole and spent elsewhere, of course.

If you want to check all this out with some lightweight statistics from the Census Bureau’s figures, click here.

You can simply chalk up the baby-boomer myth with other false stories now popular amongst the advocates of overhauling Social Security like, for instance, the number of people paying into the system today compared with the early years.

A popular bit of propaganda here is that “in 1950 there were 44 workers contributing to Social Security and today there are only three.” What they fail to mention is that in 1950 workers were contributing only one and one-half percent of their salary, matched by their employers of course which brought it to three percent. Today their total contribution is 12.4 percent.

If the declining number of contributors is such a threat, how come we had a $71 billion surplus last year, an $82 billion overcharge the year before that, $89 billion the year before that, and $98.7 billion during the first year Bush took office?

Stop the bleeding first and before anything is done to change the supplemental retirement insurance program.

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