It’s not really a new story, but things continue to advance, and it’s a useful reminder, to plan to live a long time. Unfortunately, it’s not something that most pension planners or entitlements reformers are taking into consideration. It implies that Social Security and Medicare are even more broke than we think.
4 thoughts on “Longevity”
Comments are closed.
And we have yet another way to create an unwholesome conflict of interest between us and those who shower us with such wonderful gifts.
There’s always the risk that a bunch of the central planners, when faced with evidence for substantially increased lifespan, will say, “People are living too long. We must do something about it.” And they will then do something about it.
Recent history shows that when they run out of other people’s money, they’ll just print more until and unless the system itself crashes and burns.
Even in the UK where almost a solid third of hospital deaths are murder by the state, they’re only offing the most infirmed. So, stay healthy.
What we’ll need to do is let go of the “monkey jar trap” of retirement. The whole point of that was aid for when one was too frail to work, and we are looking at fixing that, yes? Instead of retirement, second and third careers are what we should be looking at.
1. Unfunded pensions are going away. There will simply be savings accounts. I don’t know when this will happen to Social Security, but it WILL happen.
2. You can still retire if you can live off the interest in your savings account (assuming the interest pays for the cost of inflation first and your lifestyle second). Not “safe” accounts; but investments in resources ought to pay a decent return.