Reply #50: That's the standard line about Social Security. However there's a lot of

[mistertrickster]

data that says demographics aren't a big deal. See italicized sentence below.

From a 2005 Paul Krugman interview in The Rolling Stone:

What would you say to college students and young workers who are convinced they'll never see a dime of the money they put into Social Security?

You've been sold a scare story. Right now Social Security has a large and growing trust fund — a surplus that has been collected to pay for the surge in benefits we'll experience when the baby boomers start to retire. If you're twenty now, you'll be hitting retirement around 2052. That's the year the Congressional Budget Office says the trust fund will run out. In fact, many economists say it may never run out. If the economy continues to grow at an average rate, the trust fund could quite possibly last forever.

But what happens if it doesn't?

Even if the trust fund does run out, Social Security will still be able to pay eighty percent of promised benefits. The actual shortfall would be a pretty small part of the federal budget, quite easily made up from other sources. Once the whole baby-boomer generation is into the retirement pool, Social Security's share of the gross domestic product will only increase by about two percent. Well, President Bush's tax cuts are more than two percent of GDP — and they're happening right now, not fifty years from now. So the idea that there's this Social Security thing that is a huge problem is just wrong.

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/6822964/the_fake_crisis