"Do we have a problem?...Yeah, I think we do."

An excellent article in the WashPost today about how shifting demographics will force new realities both here and abroad: “Aging population poses global challenges – Health care, other rising costs to strain budgets in U.S. and abroad”:

When President Bush delivers his State of the Union address tonight, his prescriptions for Social Security are likely to vault that issue to the front of the nation's political agenda. But Social Security's financial problems are a relatively small sliver of the far larger challenges posed by an aging population, economists say.

From untamed health care programs to military pensions, housing and heating assistance to coal-miners' benefits, programs for the elderly have proliferated and grown more generous, even in the face of an aging trend that demographers have long seen coming. In that light, the fight over Social Security marks only the beginning of a national debate over the cost of a graying society -- and the inevitable reallocation of resources that is sure to produce winners and losers, in the United States and around the world.

The “good” news is that whatever problems we face in the United States will be much worse in Europe and Asia, so we can see what we might expect down the road.