No. of Recommendations: 4
More and more countries are being squeezed by demographics and slow growth. In Europe, Britain and Japan, aging populations have driven up the government’s health care and pension costs at the same time that the number of workers who provide the necessary tax revenue has shrunk.
Is that really true?
In 2000 the “under 60” population in the US was 246 million.
In 2020 the “under 60” population in the US was 275 million.
I’ll certainly concede that there are more boomers walking through the valley of death now than there were then, raising both health care and pension (SS mostly) costs, but there are also more people of working age, it appears.*
We have, of course, chopped taxes, chopped taxes, chopped taxes, all in the hope that it will rain happiness on our heads. Well, the economy is doing OK, and has been (mostly) for the past 20, 40, 60 years, so maybe it’s true. Or maybe we’ve just run up an enormous debt bill so Jeff Bezos can have a yacht that’s 10 feet longer than Larry Ellison’s. (For example.)
* Numbers found using AI, and approximation of 60 vs 62 used for age because who wants to dig that far or precisely into the census tomes? I’m not getting paid for this, you know.
