Age-adjusted life expectancy

Our society has changed in ways the founders of Social Security could not have foreseen. In today's world, people are living longer and therefore drawing benefits longer, and those benefits are scheduled to rise dramatically over the next few decades. And instead of 16 workers paying in for every beneficiary, right now it's only about three workers, and over the next few decades, that number will fall to just two workers per beneficiary. With each passing year, fewer workers are paying ever-higher benefits to an ever-larger number of retirees.

Of all the crisis bull#$%& preznit has been peddling to whip up fears that the Social Security Trust Fund, invested so fully in our worthless Treasury Notes, will soon be "flat bust," he's been given a pass on his claim that life expectency has greatly improved over the past 75 years. It's been taken as a fact, even by those opposed to the not-so-private accounts Crisis-Boy is selling, that "people are living longer."

But is it really true that people, once they've reached retirement age, are today living significantly longer than their parents and grandparents? Yes, yes, I know it is considered a truism. And yes, such factors as better medical care, lower infant mortality, the decline in smoking, and the rise in service industry rather than factory or mining employment are certainly allowing more people to reach retirment age, and, hence, average life expectancy has improved since the 1930s.

But can people expect to live significantly longer lives once they've reach 65 or 70 years of age today? We know, for instance, that maximum life expectancy has not changed significantly.

An intense, fifteen-minute search of Google has turned up only this, but it doesn't provide a graph for comparison.

Ah, but that good ol' SSA comes through.

The facts: According to the SSA, the life expectancy for a 65-year-old man in 1940 was 76.9 years. Today, a man aged 65 can be expected to live to 81. Most of the increase in life expectancy in the past half century has been for infants, not for the elderly.

Sooo...in 1940, if a typical retiree left the work force at the then standard 62, he could expect to suck the lifeblood of his children for nearly 15 years. If, as I expect, the near future retiree will be forced to work until he or she is 70, they can expect a brief 11 years of Social Security free loading.

Tell me again we're making progress here.

UPDATE: Edited for coherence.