The American Tory

I am glad to see someone out there realizes the Western democracies are facing a financial crunch on the horizon with a significant portion of their labor forces retiring.

The plan means that anyone born in 1964 or later will have to wait until they are 67 to collect a state pension.

The Bundestag also approved a bill designed to attract people born after 1945, the “baby boomers”, back into the labour market, to cut the cost of the country’s ageing population.

Now the Germans have a long way to go to effectively trim their nanny state to a sustainable level, but they are taking some key steps that many in this nation will not consider.

In 2005, only 685,000 babies were born in Germany, while 830,000 people died. Germany has a birthrate of 1.36 per woman, one of the lowest in Europe.

This is the partially the cause for their funding shortfall. You cannot pay for an aging population when there is nobody working.

The United States will not face the problem as quickly as Germany, but the longer we wait, the more it costs us in the end. We need to at least raise the retirement age and encourage more people to work if they have the physical capacity. Most jobs today do not require the physical labor that prevented people from working beyond the age of 60 in the past. This reality must be taken into account when determining the retirement age.

This is a cost my generation is going to have to deal with and the sooner the current generation deals with it, the less its going to cost their children. I will not hold my breath because the “Baby Boomers” have been the most entitled generation in American history and their old habits are hard to kill.