The paper today ran an item in the national briefs about a new White House report on Social Security:
The Bush administration said in a new report Monday that Social Security is facing a $13.6 trillion shortfall in coming years and that delaying reforms is not fair to younger workers.
The full-length AP report doesn’t provide much in the way of supporting evidence for that claim of a “$13.6 trillion shortfall,” except to say this number was arrived at by calculating a cumulative deficit into “the indefinite future.” Apparenty, in order to come up with a sufficiently scary-sounding large number, they projected the deficit expected to arise in 2042 over the next several centuries, extending a demographic bubble (the Baby Boom) into a permanent, never-ending trend.
The Treasury report also seems to be based on the assumption that, over the next few centuries, America’s population will not grow but, rather, contract.
Scary thought: What if the Bush administration knows something the rest of us don’t about the next 300 years of America’s future? Maybe they have some kind of top-secret, ultra-classified advance warning about a Children of Men-type plague. If the human race suddenly and mysteriously became unable to reproduce, there would be no new generation of workers to fulfill the intergenerational compact of Social Security. That might account for this $13.6 trillion figure.
It’s got to be something like that, because barring some such cataclysmic event producing a massive decrease in the size of future (but not present) generations, this kind of centuries-long deficit in Social Security just isn’t mathematically possible.
The Rapture, for instance. That would do it. Or a radical increase in human lifespan (110 is the new 40!). Otherwise, in a non-Rapture scenario, population growth will continue apace, demographic bubbles will work their way through the system, requiring trust funds to be established and depleted, and everlasting deficits of the sort the Treasury report describes could never occur.
But then I turned to the Health section of the paper, and suddenly it all made sense. “Transplant technologies aid aging boomers” the headline said, and the article went on to describe a somewhat disturbing array of “allografts” and “xenotransplants.”
This could help to explain why the Bush administration report contradicts the trustees of the Social Security Administration, who say that the system will more than pay for itself at least through the year 2042. The trustees are operating on the assumption that eventually the baby boomers will die. The Treasury report, on the other hand, seems to be operating on the assumption (or secret government knowledge) that the boomers will never die.
That would account for a “$13.6 trillion shortfall” ever-expanding into the “indefinite future” — a generation of retirees who continue collecting benefits forever.
But as impressive as the advance in implants and transplants might be, these still don’t seem like quite enough to produce an Eternal Generation capable of bankrupting the system to the tune of $13.6 trillion. No mere medical advance could hope to do that.
So, obviously, what we’re left with is vampirism.
We can only conclude, based on the figures they provide, that the Treasury Department has secret classified knowledge of a coming scourge of baby boomer vampires. This generation of Americans will begin retiring in three years and, instead of moving to Florida to play golf, or volunteering with the local library, they will become bloodsucking immortal creatures of the night, an army of the soulless undead, hiding from the sun, preying on the weak, and cashing their monthly checks throughout the unending centuries until the system racks up a deficit of $13.6 trillion.
Either that or the Bush administration is just lying about the numbers. Again.
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