Don’t you expect those in office, those running for office, and ninety percent of the Fourth Estate to have some smarts, to at least be fairly intelligent? Well, it doesn’t look like any of them have a lick of common sense.

Now you know that can’t possibly be true or they would not have been able to raise the money to run for office and they would never have been given jobs working for such places as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or CNN. Yet, something crazy is afoot.

How many times have you heard about “76 million baby-boomers” that are about to wreck havoc on our supplemental retirement system, Social Security? In our lives, this story plays over and over and over again. Sometimes they get the number wrong, but these “boomers” are always people born between 1946 and 1965 that supposedly produced this horde primarily due to sixteen million, shall we say lusty, service people returning home after the Second World War.

The government usually puts out a lot of propaganda and fear stories, but most of it is somewhat believable or at least within the realm of possibilities. This one is ludicrous, unreasonable, and out of the question. How gullible do they think we are? If it were true it would be a miracle.

The truth is that roughly half of the population never makes it to full retirement age. Take a look at the graph below.

 

Notice that by age 65 the fatality rate is about half of the original number we started with have died. This means that when the so-called “baby boomers” reach full retirement age there will only be about 38 million of them. What’s more, when these boomers die they will be replaced by a population that will look pretty much like the above chart. You can quote the Census Bureau, the Social Security Administration, the White House and the Associated Press for this information.

If you want to look into other, but more complicated, fallacies about “boomers” go to The Baby Boomer Myth.

Also remember that the spinmeisters never said the 76 million that they use to scare us represented births above normal, but they certainly implied it. They carefully avoid clarifying this.

I estimate there would have been roughly 69 million people born between 1946 and 1965 if there had been no World War II. Using the “76 million” fantasy figure that would mean there were about 7 million births above normal – the true baby boomers.

What’s more, I think Bill Clinton missed the decimal point his speech writers put in when they wrote his “make hay while the sun shines” speech.