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  3. Economic Death Spiral Just recently the trustees of

Economic Death Spiral Just recently the trustees of

游客2023-12-11  26
问题                         Economic Death Spiral
    Just recently the trustees of Social Security and Medicare issued their annual reports on the programs’ futures. Here’s one startling fact: By 2030 the projected costs of Social Security and Medicare could easily consume—via higher taxes—a third of workers’ future wage and salary increases. We’re mortgaging workers’ future pay gains for baby boomers’ retirement benefits.
    This matters because Social Security and Medicare are pay-as-you-go programs. Current taxpayers pay current benefits. Future taxpayers will pay future benefits. Baby boomers’ retirement benefits will come mostly from their children and grandchildren, who will be tomorrow’s workers. Consequently, baby boomers’ children and grandchildren face massive tax increases. Social Security and Medicare spending now equals 14 percent of wage and salary income, reports Elizabeth Bell, a research assistant to Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute, Washington, DC. By 2030, using the trustees’ various projections, that jumps to 26 percent. Of course, payroll taxes don’t cover all the costs of Social Security and Medicare. Still, these figures provide a crude indicator of the economic burden, because costs are imposed heavily on workers via some tax, government borrowing and cuts in other government programs.
    It can be argued that the costs are bearable. The wage gains in the trustees’ reports could prove too pessimistic. Like all forecasts, they’re subject to errors. Even if they come true, they assume that tomorrow’s wages will be higher than today’s. Productivity increases; wages rise. In 2030, under the trustees’ " intermediate " assumptions, workers’ before-tax incomes would be about a third higher than now, says Tom Saving of Texas A&M University. What’s the complaint if workers lost—through steeper taxes—some of that? Why shouldn’t they generously support parents and grandparents? Well, maybe they will. But there are at least two possible flaws in this logic.
    The first is that, on a year-to-year basis, wage gains would be tiny—less than 1 percent. When they’ve gotten that low before, people have complained that they’re "on a treadmill" and that the American dream has been withdrawn. Even these gains might be diluted by further tax increases to trim today’s already swollen budget deficits. The second and more serious threat is that higher taxes would harm the economy. They might dull economic vitality by reducing investment and the rewards for work and risk taking. Productivity and wage gains might be smaller than predicted. Then we’d flirt with that death spiral: We’d need still higher taxes to pay benefits, but those taxes might depress economic growth more.
    One way or another, workers may get fed up with paying so much of their paychecks to support retirees, many of whom were living quite comfortably. So we ought to redefine the generational compact to lighten the burden of an aging population on workers. The needed steps are clear: to acknowledge longer life expectancies by slowly raising eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare; to limit future spending by curbing retirement benefits for the better-off; to keep people in the productive economy longer by encouraging jobs that mix " work" and "retirement". [br] It can be learnt from the trustees’ reports that______.
选项 A、the costs of retirement programs are decreasing
B、government’s capacity to provide social security increases
C、future income will rise at a steady but low pace
D、fewer workers will support more retirees in the future
答案 C
解析 本题考查观点细节题。文章第三段第二句和第四句提到：在基金的报告中．对工资增长的看法颇为悲观(pessimistic)；这报告也同样认为未来的工资水平会比现在的高。由此可见，[C]项是报告所反映的问题，为正确答案。第二段倒数第二、三句提到，根据基金理事的各种预计，社保和医保费用在工资中的比例会从现在的14％上升到2030年的26％。退休项目的费用占社保和医保费用的绝大部分，所以退休项目的支出会增加，[A]项与原意相反。退休项目的支出增加不一定说明政府提供社会保障的能力增强，排除[B]。虽然首段末句提到“高峰期”出生的人将是未来的退休人员，但无法推知未来劳动者数量会减少，因此排除[D]。
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