The 44 percent dropouts from college (much related to the outrageous cost of higher education) with reduced labor market skills will also be a drag on senior entitlements. And the astonishing $937 billion dollars in outstanding student loans--with an additional $100 billion added each year -- will translate into reduced discretionary spending later, which will hurt businesses, resulting in lower tax revenues and another blow to entitlements.
Health and entitlements
A healthy workforce is vital to providing revenues for entitlements. Currently we are in the grips of numerous epidemics among children, young and middle-aged adults: obesity, diabetes, asthma, coronary disease, osteoporosis and cancer. Disease is not only costly it lowers workforce productivity -- a $63 billion loss in productivity each year. Chronic disease will also shorten the years of work force participation. Healthcare and prevention for all should be high up among the issues for senior advocacy.
Immigration will strengthen senior entitlements
Throughout the industrialized world fertility rates are falling dramatically. Countries like Italy, Germany and Japan will suffer significant population losses, thus reducing the number of workers to maintain vigorous economies that can support growing elderly populations. The U.S. fertility rate is in better shape and near replacement levels (each couple must replace themselves or the population will decline) for one reason: immigration. The high birth rate among immigrants and first generation families is comparable to the height of our baby boom era. But immigration is under attack. Advocacy groups for the elderly must take on the promotion of a sound immigration policy that will help provide future workers to sustain senior entitlements.
Job creation
Increasing our manufacturing base and restoring jobs for workers at all levels of education and ability are no brainers if we are serious about bolstering the underpinnings of entitlements. These are issues for senior advocacy that will put teeth into demands for maintaining current levels of entitlements.
What can seniors contribute?
Their role in society will have to change. They too will have to contribute to productivity in some fashion. Why?
A society dominated by the third age is an immense game changer. Older adults' behavior and preferences are sharply different from those of younger people, on economic, social and political issues -- from fashion and relationships to religion and civic life (e.g. voting in greater percentages than all other age groups), and much more.
This vast shift of generational domination is comparable to the upheavals of other great game changers like the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution -- with one glaring difference. Those revolutions added to productivity. They created new industries, new jobs, expanded opportunities, and brought higher standards of living to greater numbers of people. In contrast, the longevity revolution, with its fifty percent increase in life expectancy over the last hundred years has focused primarily on how to stem the economic hemorrhaging caused by the growing imbalance of productive workers to retirees.
A sweeping societal revolution cannot be successful if it rests on payouts to the largest and still growing segment of society. How then can seniors add to productivity?
Working longer is not the answer
That's the facile solution of economists and demographers who look at cold facts and conclude that older people will just have to work longer -- perhaps till they drop. Middle-aged workers may agree as they look at their dismal savings, rising debts, shrinking 401Ks and falling values of their homes.
But ask people over age 65 about work (that's when work really counts toward buttressing the economics of the retirements years) you you get less enthusiastic responses. And the enthusiasm fades even more among 70-75 year olds. Moreover, many people over 65 can't continue to work. They are increasingly replaced by younger workers, or they don't have the skills needed for the technological workplace, or they have disabilities or health issues. And for the unemployed, even after age fifty, finding a job is treading a rough if not barren road.
If not traditional work then what?
One place to start indirectly adding to productivity is helping young people become productive workers. Remember, children are key to sustaining senior entitlements. Eventually, it's their tax revenues that will fund programs for the elderly.
Seniors embody a vast untapped reservoir of skills and talents
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