Everybody's saying it: America is facing a Gray Glut. In fact, it'll be a great gray glut. People may not use just those words, but that's what they're forecasting: too many gray-haired elders living on pensions, not enough young people to do the work. The famous generation of "baby boomers" will reach retirement age, and the smaller generation which they procreated will have to support them. We face a glut of grey hairs to be respected, and what's worse, supported.
There is always guesswork in predictions, but the comparative sizes of two generations are already clear. The baby boomers of the fifties and early sixties have already been born and are nearing or well into middle age. The 20-year baby slump that followed the baby boom is also a recorded fact. [1] (Parents who had children in school during the seventies will remember it well: it hit us as a wave of school closings. There weren’t enough kids.)
More recently, breeding has come back into fashion — but meanwhile, old people's lives have been getting longer, and medical care has become more expensive. The problem continues to shape up: at the height of their working careers, a smallish contingent of "busters" will have to maintain a large remnant of "boomers", plus more carry-overs from earlier generations than were originally expected.
Of course, the best-founded apprehensions of mice and men come oft to nought. Maybe there will be a great epidemic which sweeps away the elderly and spares the young. Maybe. We can't count on that, though, and we wouldn't want it on our consciences to be sort of hoping.
There's another way to beat the numbers, and a few people (libertarians in particular) even advocate it: we can "import" young people from abroad. We can have all the young workers we want from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe.
To have a favorable impact on the gray glut problem, immigrants would have to leave their own parents behind, or at least undertake to pay for our retirees on top of their own. It might be feasible: the opportunity to work in a more productive environment is worth something, and we could exact a price for it in the form of a special Social Security surtax to be paid only by new immigrants -- say, for their first five years here. It wouldn't be that different from the "indenture" agreements by which some of our own ancestors made their way to America.
Large-scale immigration, however, is bound to involve some heartburn. The difference between an invasion and an open door is only a matter of numbers and of mood. Let's leave that discussion for another time, and suppose that present trends will continue: at some point, there will indeed be a heavy load of seniors relative to the work force in America.
So we’d better brace ourselves for a gray glut, right?
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