Free Essays,College Free Essays,Free College Essays at Anti Essays

The year is 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is sitting down to add another item to the new deal to try to spark the recovering economy of United States. F.D.R is creating a way to spread the wealth of the nation over the entire population. He creates the Social Security program, which takes pay out of workers' checks and pays it out to the elderly to create a means of income after retirement. This is to be paid to citizens for the rest of their lives. The system works great in theory. This system, however, will fail if certain conditions exist. For the current system to function correctly everyone must live to roughly the same age; the average life span can not change rapidly, or sporadically over a large period of time. In addition, the size of population must change in correlation with the average life span. If the population does not grow consistently, this will create

disturbances in the payments and financing of the Social Security program. If this problem is not corrected in the near future, the bulk of the United States will suffer the repercussions of a poorly financed government system.

As the end of World War II approaches, the United States is experiencing the largest birth rate in history (Knutson). These babies were even dubbed "baby boomer" because for the size of the new generation, and their rapid births. As the demographics of the citizens in the United States continue to change, we grow increasingly needy of a Social Security reform. When the Social Security program was kicked off in 1935, the average life span was 61 years (Bettelheim 870). That implies more than half the population was no expected to receive any payments for Social Security, which started at age 65. In the next few years, the average life span can be expected to approach 80. This means that within the next few years, every working citizen will receive an average of fifteen years of Social Security support. The growth...