THE WISDOM FUND: News & Views
March 19, 2015
Asia Times

Being Old In 2040 Will Be No Fun

by Martin Hutchinson

. . . In 2030, when the early baby boomers are mostly still with us, politicians will still be pushing problems off into the future as far as possible, in order to avoid the wrath of geriatric voters. Taxes will have risen, savings will have been decimated, but with the application of copious short-term remedies, the problem will still not be in its acute stage.

By 2040, however, with the first half of the baby boomer cohort departed, Nemesis will have arrived. The social security trust fund will have run out, leading to sharp cuts in payouts to retirees. The comforting idea that because we will be richer by then, a 25% (or whatever) cut in benefits will still leave recipients better off than today's retirees, will prove to have been rubbish.

With excessive regulation, government bloat and funny money, productivity growth in the US is running at unprecedentedly low levels (and in Britain has even been negative since 2007). Thus wages in 2033 will not be much higher than today, and the cut in benefits will bite hard.

What's worse, the voters of that day will see Medicare and other old-age costs apparently rising inexorably over several decades, both absorbing hefty tax increases and making US debt soar to dangerous levels at which its repayment is doubtful.

Round about 2040, a debt crisis will occur - at which point the obvious solution will be to cut back drastically the benefits available to old people, who are no longer producing incomes that can be taxed in order to repay debt, and who collectively bear much of the guilt for the parlous US fiscal position.

The Millennials and their successors will blame the old for their predicament and relative poverty, and they will have a substantial amount of reason on their side. Their revenge will be severe, and the old folk of 2040, those born between say 1955 and 1975, will see themselves reduced to a penury reminiscent of the British old of 1965 or the American old of 1895. . . .

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U.S. National Debt Clock - Real Time

"America: Freedom to Fascism," The Wisdom Fund, October 6, 2005

"The Looting of America," The Wisdom Fund, February 7, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts, "An Economy Destroyed: The Enemy is Washington," counterpunch.org, July 22, 2011

"The Occupy Movement," The Wisdom Fund, October 5, 2011

"BRICS Rising," The Wisdom Fund, July 15, 2014

[A lot of data suggests that the gold standard is the best formula to bring America, and the world, out of economic stagnation. Rickards, in The Death of Money, is less interested in the death of Federal Reserve Notes than in the resurrection of the dollar as Gold Certificates. That resurrection is a recipe for equitable prosperity, job creation, ending wage stagnation and inequitable income distribution, and curing our chronic federal deficit.--Ralph Benko, "Is James Rickards Right About A Coming Monetary Apocalypse?," forbes.com, April 28, 2014]

VIDEO (James Rickards): "Evidence of an imminent 100 trillion U.S. collapse," March, 2015

[The stages of the capture of democracy by big money are traced in a paper called "The Collapse of Democratic Nation States" by theologian and environmentalist Dr. John Cobb. Going back several centuries, he points to the rise of private banking, which usurped the power to create money from governments . . .

The federal government could take back the power to create the national money supply by issuing its own Treasury notes as Abraham Lincoln did. Alternatively, it could issue some very large denomination coins as authorized in the Constitution; or it could nationalize the central bank and use quantitative easing to fund infrastructure, education, job creation, and social services, responding to the needs of the people rather than the banks.--Ellen Brown, "How America Became an Oligarchy," ellenbrown.com, April 6, 2015]

[In any situation we benefit from peace.--The Saker, "What does Putin want? A major analysis by Rostislav Ishchenko," thesaker.is, April 22, 2015]

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, "HSBC fears world recession with no lifeboats left," telegraph.co.uk, May 24, 2015

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