Cutting benefits won’t make it easier for America to support its growing elderly population. Expanding immigration and raising taxes would. EricLevitz writes on our looming retirement crisis
Not so golden years. Photo: Getty Images America is getting older. The elderly are living longer. Private pensions are disappearing, working-class wage growth has long been middling, the cost of health care is soaring , our nation’s birth rate is plummeting — and the problem that these trends collectively create is genuinely vexing.
There is a real crisis here, and it demands a policy response. Unfortunately, the Beltway’s purveyors of bipartisan common sense insist on misdescribing that crisis, and prescribing a cure that would make our actual problem worse. “We will need a combination of increased taxes and reduced benefits, undoubtedly,” he said. “But if we wait, the deficits will only grow and the eventual solution will be much more painful.”
Further, the exceptionally high and rising cost of health care in the U.S. is not a fact of nature. Relative to citizens of other countries, Americans wildly overpay for drugs, administration, physicians, and most hospital procedures. Imposing stiff cost controls on the health-care sector — whether through the establishment of a single-payer system, or some other form of all-payer rate setting — would go a long way toward easing seniors’ financial burdens, and our government’s fiscal ones.
Meanwhile, as a substantive matter, it would be utterly reasonable for the U.S. to decide to pare back on defense and hike up taxes, as a means of keeping its promises to seniors. America’s tax level, as a percentage of GDP, is much lower than most of its peers in Western Europe, as is its level of social spending. To say that our existing safety net is so generous that it cannot possibly be sustained by tax rates that are compatible with economic growth is to deny the existence of Scandinavia.
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