On aging, and its affect on Society

The first book to provide a personal plan that will help individuals avert an increasingly pervasive crisis by planning their future financial and healthcare need. Non-technical language explains the complex interrelationships among money, investments, income, risk, healthcare and estate planning. Checklists.

Observers in many industrialized countries believe population aging represents a serious economic threat. Increases in the percentage of the population past retirement age may impose unsustainable burdens on future workers. Either taxes or government debt will have to rise substantially to pay for old-age income support. This paper considers the extent of these burdens and corrects the widespread impression that the burdens are unsupportable. Population aging means that contributions needed to support the retired elderly must rise. But this extra burden will be at least partly offset by a reduced need to support the dependent young, who will become relatively less numerous. The extra burden of an aging population would be smaller still if labor force participation rates among the working-age and elderly populations increased. Indeed, employment rates among the nonaged have risen in nearly all the industrialized countries as a growing percentage of women has entered the work force. Many countries, including the United States, have adopted policies to encourage work among people past the traditional retirement age.

Examines the effects of rising social security costs and of measures adopted to deal with them, and discusses possible ways of coping with the shortfall of available money for the aging American population.