OK, stop us if you’ve heard this before- we’re getting older. Sound familiar? Of course it does.
For years we’ve heard and read about the impending retirement of the 75 million or so boomers. Volumes upon volumes have been written about how this fundamental demographic shift will affect our communities. And, really, this is a dramatic change.
The bulk of community planning for the past few decades has been geared to the working age classes and their children because, simply, they constituted the vast majority of the total population. This will no longer be the case, so the fundamental planning assumptions must change. And they will.
Concomitant with the aging of the population is the squeezing of the working age population, meaning that there will be fewer workers to support a growing “dependent” population. So not only do we need to rethink who our communities are designed for, we also need to think about the workforce of the future.
How can we continue to support traditional safety net programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security if there are going to be fewer workers contributing to these programs and more people drawing from them?
A lot of political capital is being spent on being the toughest on immigration, but given the coming trends, is immigration, including those here illegally, a solution?
