It just seems like we could adjust our economy to compensate for a shrinking population. The answer of paying your working population more seems so much easier trying to get people to have kids they don’t want. It would also slow the population shrink by making children more affordable, but a smaller population seems far more sustainable than an ever growing one and a shrinking one seems like it should decrease suffering with the resources being less in demand.
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The way programs like Social Security and Medicare work is by taxing people who work to pay for benefits for people who no longer work. It’s not a personal savings account.
When the program was implemented in the 1930s, you had senior citizens who had already retired and weren’t making any money. To give them Social Security, you took money from the people who were currently working. So the money coming out of your paycheck now isn’t for you — it’s for the people who paid for the people behind them, who paid for the people behind them, and so on. [Currently about 67 million people (1 in 5 Americans) receive Social Security benefits](https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/chartbooks/fast_facts/2020/fast_facts20.html).
As the number of people working declines, you either have to cut benefits or increase taxes, or both.
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