Bernie Sanders Has An Amazingly Simple Idea To Fix Social Security For The Next 75 Years

[HiPointDem]

42. Bullshit. BY 1965 ratio of workers to beneficiaries was already 4 to 1.

Repeating that canard about the "vast" numbers of workers supporting each retiree in the past without factoring in productivity *is* parroting the right-wing talking points.


What does productivity growth mean for the future of Social Security?

In order to get an accurate picture of who is contributing to Social Security and how much, first we must measure the right thing.

Social Security solvency is not just about the number of people contributing to the system, but about how much they are contributing. Because of productivity growth, workers today are more than twice as productive as they were a generation ago. So, 16 workers from 1955 are are much less efficient than 16 workers today, rendering any comparisons moot.

Social Security already weathered a much more dramatic change in the worker-to-retiree ratio when it went from 18-to-1 in 1950 to 4-to-1 in 1965 without collapsing. Compared to that change in just 15 years, the far less dramatic change from today’s 3-to-1 ratio to 2080s 2-to-1 ratio is less daunting. To understand why, we have to look at the bigger picture.

The Social Security Trustees conservatively project that productivity gains will slow to 1.6% per year by 2013 and beyond. Even that amount of growth generates 91% more output per hour by 2045, as shown in Figure 2. In other words, the total output of American workers (measured in gross domestic product, or GDP) will grow from $84,152 per worker today to $156,285 per worker (in today’s 2004 dollars) by 2045. Even when that growth is spread among 8% more people per worker, it would raise GDP per capita. Future workers will be so much more productive that they will be in a position to support Social Security and still be better off than today’s workers.

http://www.epi.org/publication/ib208/