The Shape of Things to Come

John F. Schmidt

2/7/02

Something happened to me on the way to a real estate license recently. We were analyzing mortgage types when the subject of Social Security came up.

Being a slightly aging baby boomer, this subject always interests me because I will probably be in the generation that gets short-changed. The whole system will likely go belly up just when I will need it. And I’m not the only one. (To quote John Lennon) A lot of my money is going into the system and I suspect I am not going to see it again. I imagine the Federal bank vault will look like Scrooge Mc Duck’s money bin after the Beagle boys have cleaned it out. Not a pretty picture.

Of course the problem is explained by something called Demographics. It is the study of the effects of large aggregates of people in certain age groups as they progress through time. The size and makeup of these groups can have predictable effects on huge elements of the economy.

As a “Baby Boomer”, I share the dubious distinction of being in an age group that actually has a name attached to it. We are the generation born just after World War Two and the following decade. We are the result of the young soldiers coming back home to their sweethearts and making up for lost time while they were overseas. It’s a bit more complicated than that, really, but about sixty million babies were conceived in the late 40’s and early 50’s. (See “IDB Population Pyramids” website for statistics.)

They caused massive dislocations to the country and world as they grew up and entered the workforce. They swamped the schools in the late fifties and early sixties. That prompted a massive building boom – schools included. They overwhelmed the colleges in the 1970’s, and collapsed the old college cultures by sheer weight of numbers. In society at large, the normal civilizing influence of the parent’s culture was swept away by an enormous bloc of young people of similar age.

The workforce was impacted as they grew up to marry and have their own kids. The economy and especially the stock market began feeling the effects in the mid-eighties and early nineties. The largest economic expansion in history began and is still underway. It won’t stop for another 15 years or so when the peak of the baby boomers begins to retire. 9-11, as bad as it was, is only a hiccup in that huge movement.

As exhilarating as the stock market run-up has been, there are some very disquieting predictions afoot. Retirement is looming for boomers. When we leave the workplace, it will create (literally) a big hole. There will be shortages of skills and people that won’t be easy to fill. There will be a huge boom in geriatric services of all kinds. The sunbelt real estate industry will explode because of the Grey tide surging in. But the influx of money into the market will drop off pretty fast when boomers start to retire in large numbers. One can only shudder at the consequences of so many people reversing their saving habits and replacing them with spending their mutual funds and cashing in their stocks and bonds. The optimism of today’s relatively good times may be replaced by a pessimism that knows no bounds.

One of the biggest problems for the boomers will be the Social Security fund: it is going to make a huge sucking sound sometime around 2020 and go bankrupt. Taxes will go up astronomically.

Now to some extent some of this would have happened simply due to the demographics of the boomer’s births, but one very large phenomenon has made it much worse.

When my Real Estate instructor commented on the coming implosion of Social Security, I just couldn’t resist raising my hand and dropping a thought-bomb on the class. “The problem is that there are 35 million people missing from the workforce that would have been in the earning and paying economy when the boomers retire” I said. “They would have kept Social Security afloat. Maybe we could have dodged a bullet - except we aborted them.” The teacher looked thoughtful and commented “I never thought of that before.” The ensuing buzz of conversation showed that a lot of other people had never thought that either.

But one person in the back spoke up. “We are better off because so many of them would have been on welfare or would have required support from the rest of us.” And so we went on break.

My question to that person, and you readers is this: do you really think that we are better off for having aborted 35 million of our fellow humans? Isn’t that the ultimate “sour grapes” excuse?

The actuarial tables predict that the people who did most of the aborting – the baby boomers – are going to be one sorry bunch when they retire. And it will be in large measure because they killed off a significant number of people who would have been paying into the Social Security fund at just the time they were bowing out of the workforce and needing the money.

That may seem to be a pretty crass way of setting a value on 35 million people, but for a generation that valued money and self indulgence more than the lives of many of their children, it does seem to make sense to put it in terms they would clearly understand: money and life style. They are going to be hurting acutely in precisely those two areas when they retire.

My fellow student’s comment impacted me for another reason. He assumed that these people, and the rest of us, were better off with the babies dead. In other words, death was the better choice.

I strongly disagree with that idea. My bet is on life and on the value and creative ability that God built into every child ever born. It does not make any difference where they are born, or their race or ethnicity, or their outward economic circumstances. They are unique and special, all 35 million of them. We need to see them that way, and teach them to value themselves as special too. They are creatures uniquely made in the image of God.

People are not junk to be thrown on a trash heap, or kits of parts to be “harvested” in some ghoulish procedure so someone can enhance their ‘quality of life.’ No human gets to make that decision: it is God’s alone and He will hold any person or nation accountable who has the arrogance to claim that “choice” for itself.

Psalm 9:16 says “The Lord is known by the judgment which He executeth: the wicked is snared in the work of his own hands. Selah.” Selah, indeed. The upcoming Social Security debacle seems to be a judgment tailor-made for folks like us. And that may be the mildest of the judgments we have coming.

In the matter of Abortion, we have not “chosen wisely.”