Editor's Note: Paul Kleyman, the esteemed Editor at The American Society of Aging, recently spoke about the news media's failure to report accurately on issues related to aging and its tendency to rely on tired stereotypes about older Americans. RedwoodAge.com is publishing his speech, delivered Dec. 13 to the Marin (California) Commission on Aging, with minimal editing as a special four-part series. We hope his viewpoints will help provide balance to other reporting on these critical issues. We welcome your comments, which may be entered below his remarks.

RedwoodAge.com

If you’ve missed the news, we’re in the fastest aging culture in history - especially with the aging of the boomer generation - despite how many of us are tired of hearing about the boomers.

Quite simply, the boomers will be critical to changing how our culture views and treats people in their later years.

Kleyman (ASA)

In the mainstream media, boomers have two emerging stereotypes: Boomer Jeckyll is the hale and hearty active ager in the upscale brain fitness salons and in Viagra ads. But Boomer Hyde is profligate. He’s Mr. Me-Generation and is in the process of stealing our grandchildren’s future. Typical of the news media’s handling of the boomer generation was its recent mishandling of the case of one Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, who was widely touted as the first baby boomer.

Casey-Kirschling turns 62 on January 1 at 12:00 a.m., plus one second. She was presented this October by the Social Security Administration as the first boomer to sign up for retirement benefits. 

Ostensibly, the administration staged the press conference with her to promote its new online applications process. Yet, few articles I saw even bothered to mention that fact.

Almost all of the stories, though, used news columns to declare an impending entitlement crisis. Reporters from the Washington Post to KTVU Channel 2 in Oakland politicized the news, using many of the same slanted claims - with the same presumption of conventional wisdom - that I’ve heard echoing over the last two decades or more.

For example, Dana Milbank - one of the most prominent reporters and columnist for the Washington Post - wrote in an article also published in the San Francisco Chronicle that Casey-Kirschling represents: “the 80-million strong Baby Boom generation, which, starting next year, will begin to bankrupt the nation by crashing the Medicare and Social Security systems.” 

This ran as a news article, not as opinion or analysis.

Now - this kind of claim has been stated so often that people widely believe it to be true. But it’s a reporter’s job to actually report on the range of expert opinion - not to quote only one side of an issue.

One thing that many of these articles share is an uncontested recitation of what economists call the worker-to-retiree dependency ratio. That’s a mouthful, I know.

It’s become conventional wisdom that since Social Security was passed, the number of workers needed to pay for the retirement of elders has shrunk dramatically to about four workers to one retiree today - and that this ratio will eventually hit two workers needed to support every retiree if things aren’t changed soon.

What’s wrong with the alarming picture of a national crisis is that economists worldwide don’t actually use the worker-retiree ratio to gauge the health of any nation’s economy. They examine the full dependency ratio. This measure includes all workers and all of those who are not working, especially children.

In the United States, the full dependency ratio was never tighter than in 1964, when most of the boomers were born but few of them were out of school and in the workforce, yet. In 1964, for example, there were 70 million Americans in the workforce and 124 million not on the job for various reasons. In 2004, there were 139 million workers in the US - twice as many as in 1964 - and only 108 million not working. The ratio was actually worse 43 years ago. More important than these numbers, though, is the overall health of the economy.

Let me say here that when we get deeply into the policy weeds, the arguments between conservative policy wonks and progressives start sounding pretty arcane. How many retirees can dance on the head of a worker’s pin?

What’s important, I think, is that one-sided arguments don’t help us prepare for the future.   

A human problem with the more limited worker-retiree ratio is that it fails to account for the potential productivity of our new age-force of healthier, more affluent, more energetic older adults - many of whom can work longer. Just think of the added employee payroll tax contributions and the reduced draw on benefits.

Rather than merely talk about benefit cuts and higher taxes, we need to expand the debate to include things like ending age discrimination in the workplace and encouraging employers to retain and hire older workers.  

Gerontologists also point to the tremendous intergenerational contributions being made by grandparents and, increasingly, great-grandparents. So the bean counters tend not to count the human beings, that is, the human capital that contributes to an elder culture in non-financial ways.

For example, researchers at USC have a 35-year-long study showing that four-generation families have become commonplace - and the support of grandparents has become increasingly important.

These are just some of the factors not taken into account by those who try to reduce this discussion to a scare tactic - one that sounds like, “Are you and your programs still ripping off your grandkid’s future?”

The conventional wisdom repeatedly tells us that the consequences of inaction will be that future obligations for Social Security and Medicare will reach $50 trillion or more. Actually, these are projections - stated in many media reports as accepted fact - that come straight out of the conservative Heritage Foundation and libertarian Cato Institute. 

Not only are the figures highly debatable, but the conservative economists who created them will admit - deep in the policy wonk weeds of their papers - that most of these amounts come from our uncontrolled healthcare costs, not from the cost of social programs.

Actually, the Social Security actuaries project a $4.7 trillion deficit in Social Security over the next 75 years, the period used for Social Security projections.

That represents a shortfall over the next 75 years of only 1.9% of revenue from taxing American income over those seven-plus decades. That’s a problem - but hardly a crisis. Less than 2%.

By the way, this shortfall compares with a $14.5 trillion loss in federal revenue from the Bush tax cuts over 75 years.