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  3. Economic Death Spiral Just recently the trustees of

Economic Death Spiral Just recently the trustees of

游客2024-12-16  24
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gotten that low before, people have complained that they’re "on a treadmill" and that the American dream has been withdrawn.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] To avoid a dismal future of the retirement programs, maybe we could______.
选项 A、acknowledge generational conflicts
B、raise the retirement age by several years
C、impose a heavy tax on rich people
D、encourage early full retirement
答案 B
解析 本题考查具体细节题。文章末段提出减轻劳动者经济负担的三个方法：提高社保和医保的最低年龄；控制富裕人士的退休金额；鼓励延长人们的工作年限。可见，[B]为正确答案。[A]、[C]是分别利用该段出现的词语generational compact(代际契约)和the better-off(富裕人士)制造的干扰项。[D]错在“完全退休”，该段末句提到的是一种“部分退休形式”(mix“work”and“retirement”)。
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