Thursday, August 14, 2008

New Census projections of aging population

Forbes reports on new Census Bureau projections of the U.S. population. A couple things are interesting: the underlying assumptions differ from the Social Security in several respects, such as higher fertility, longer life expectancies, and higher immigration. Yet these differences tends to offset each other, such that the final percentage of the population aged 65 and over is just slightly above that projected by the Social Security Trustees (around 20.2% vs. 19.7% in the year 2050). The Census projections, if applied to Social Security, might imply a slightly larger deficit, but I suspect the difference wouldn't be too great. But this does reinforce my view that the Trustees' underlying assumptions are at least reasonable.

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