It may be surprising to know the fact that once you retire from your work, you are of no financial use to the government of any country where you are living. Thus the government does not see any financial incentive to invest in your longevity or long term health. The fact is that the government who offers any sort of social programs, including social security, saves money when you die as soon as possible after retirement. If someone is living up to 80’s or 90’s, the government is incurring a lot of expenses on the person over the long haul, whereas if a person dies immediately after his retirement, that person has lived our his productive, tax paying life, and yet have not cost the government by staying on the public payrolls.

Sometimes, it can be quite surprising to believe that the government hopes to die at an even early age. The US government in particular is promoting prescription drugs and discrediting nutritional supplements to make sure that no one lives for a very long age. Personally, I don’t want anyone to go through this feeling of some giant conspiracy to make everybody ill just to prevent the government from going bankrupt.

In my feeling, the government cannot do anything to prevent bankruptcy in the first place. We are already bankrupt. Social security is already broke. How does that make different if people get to live longer and collecting more social security? Kiss your social security deposits goodbye if you are still under the age of 40. Chances of out living social security’s solvency are more prominent.

Or to say it differently, our lawmakers will keep increasing the retirement age just to make sure that nobody is eligible to collect their benefits. Pretty soon, the retirement age will increase to 70 or 75 and later 80. All they have to do is to increase the retirement age so that very few people manage to live that long.

Today, our nation is going bankrupt anyway, and much of that bankruptcy is caused by health care costs. Statistics show that the costs absorb up to 25 percent of our gross domestic product. On every four dollars earned, one dollar is spent just on health care. It is therefore reducing our competitiveness in the global marketplace.

We need to start investing in prevention, but for that we need to have a healthy population. I don’t believe the government will be able to afford it. Taxes would have to rise considerably if the average lifespan in increased by only five years.

If we can have an effective system where people somehow paid more money to the government for each day they lived after the age of 70, we would have surely seen more sorts of government-funded investments in longevity research. They would be banning dangerous food ingredients and toxic prescription drugs daily. Cigarettes would be outlawed. More and more junk food advertising will get banned. Subsidies would be offered for monthly fitness club memberships. And the average lifespan of U.S. citizens would skyrocket.

But this can happen only in a fantasy world if I think right. In the real world, no one will make money if you are living longer. The only person to benefit is YOU.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 6:55 pm and is filed under Bankruptcy, Personal Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.