By The Numbers - part the sixty sixth

With the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts revving up their Founding Fathers engine, let's have a look at one of the bigger lies they rely on: socialized medicine for geezers is a cost we can't and shouldn't afford because Americans are living so much longer than they used to. Keeping geezers alive is an unjust burden on the Young (tee hee).

Well, as mentioned before in these essays, it depends on how you measure. Here's one report (from the esteemed school that wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024^© claims to have "gone to") that provides some data.

In 1900, one in 40 Americans died annually. By 2013, that rate was roughly one in 140, a cumulative improvement of more than two thirds. As shown in Figure 1, life expectancy at birth rose by more than 30 years over this period, from 47 to 79.

All well and good. And true. But not relevant to the question of the burden of keeping geezers alive now versus 1900. To be blunt: 65 year old geezers will not now, or likely ever, live to 95 as a matter of course. The 30 years is almost wholly due to the Younger Generations not dying like flies. If you made it to adulthood in 1900 or 2024, your cohort of geezers will be about the same.

So, what?

[T]he average life expectancy at age 65 (i.e., the number of years a person could be expected to receive unreduced Social Security retirement benefits) has increased a modest 5 years (on average) since 1940.

And, one might expect, not much different if using 1900 as base: almost all the interventions keeping geezers alive longer have happened post WWII.

So, you guys, shut the fuck up. It bears repeating - since SS is a current account system (NOT an individual retirement account), getting babies to live to adulthood (and contributing) is a Good Thing. It's why the parents of Baby Boomers got fat and happy on SS - more workers. Just Dumb Vance^© is a dumb motherfucker, fur shur, but if Mother Earth weren't overstocked as it is, then rebalancing the age distribution with scads of sub-GED fishbelly white babies would also be something of a Good Thing (if it weren't powered by eugenics, of course). But Mother Earth is overstocked, and the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts and fellow travelers deny that Mother Earth is hot under the collar. And ready to burn the whole thing down. Mother Earth got along just fine without humans for Billions of years. She will again. She's nostalgic.