Writing in the September 1 New York Times about the financial woes of Social Security, C. Eugene Steuerle and Glenn Kramon insist “Young Americans Can’t Keep Funding Boomers and Beyond.” The gist of their argument is that given the pay-as-you-go financing mechanism of Social Security, benefits to a relatively large Baby Boomer population cannot continue to be paid for by smaller demographic cohorts of Millennials and Gens X, Z, and Alpha. They want to cut benefits and raise retirement ages so that people have (and contribute through) additional “productive years.”

Teresa Ghilarducci’s new book, Work, Retire, Repeat  challenges this argument, as do I. Ghilarducci exposes the implicit dirty little secret in arguments like Steuerle and Kramon’s: Because one’s time on this planet is fixed, shifting time from retirement to “productive” (i.e., work) years means fewer of the former. In other words, work longer, die faster, contribute more, collect less.

I want to shift the debate from economics to culture. The retirement problem is not first and foremost about economics. The retirement problem is first and foremost a human problem. Do people have a “right” to some degree of rest and relaxation after a lifetime of work and while they may still have sufficient physical and mental strength to enjoy that free time? Or is any time not spent in contributing to GDP by definition “unproductive?” Are human beings primarily to be seen as “producers,” with the very real danger that how we see them subtly shifts into how we value them, particularly in a culture that has shifted from “sanctity” to “quality” of life indices?

While refusing to let the elderly out to pasture, Steuerle and Kramon are deafeningly silent about the contemporary demographic crisis. They admit that the smaller post-Baby Boom demographic cohorts are struggling to maintain their elders via Social Security (along with all the other things they have and want to pay for).

But there is no discussion of the postponement of marriage and the evaporation of parenthood among those cohorts. There’s no critique of the fact that American fertility has fallen below replacement level.

If Social Security only works when people pay more into the system than they take out of it, you have three choices:

i. Fewer people pay more.

ii. More people pay less.

iii. More people collect less.

Steuerle and Kramon assume (i) is (should be?) the unsustainable norm and, therefore, (iii) is the solution. There’s no suggestion that (ii) might come into play. There’s no discussion about the value of the smaller cohorts of post-Baby Boomers being more fertile and multiplying. There’s no talk about parents of “furry babies” having human babies.

That, at least in Democratic/leftist circles, would be “weird.”

But those choices are not economically dictated. They are values choices. Which affirms my argument: Without denying an economic component, the retirement crisis is first and foremost about cultural values.

Because to be honest, if we really wanted to talk about factors contributing to Social Security’s cashflow problems, we’d discuss the 63,000,000 missing American workers (therefore not paying into the SS retirement fund) in the almost half-century since Roe v. Wade.  Those “personal choices” have real social impact.

But that question—especially in an election year in which abortionists hope to lock down abortion-on-demand in up to ten states—is passed over with a silence that would make practitioners of omertà blush with envy. Which again says that at root this is a values problem.

The sole admission Steuerle and Kramon make to the demographic deficit they imply is putting Social Security under a fiscal stress test is to say we should “repair our immigration system so that new Americans can help support benefits for older ones.”  In other words, import a population to replace the missing one.

If you listen carefully to the rhetoric of Democrats and the Left in general, there is more and more suggestion that America’s upside-down demographic pyramid requires large scale immigration to address the needs of an aging society. While declaring war on American fertility, at the same time they are perfectly content to import foreigners to work and pay into our Social Security system and foreign labor to tend to the aged, especially in hospitals, nursing homes, and other institutions.

But if we don’t want to discuss our culture of life crisis, how much longer before those retirees who are no longer “productive” turn into “useless eaters,” the new population “we don’t want to have too many of?” Canada’s MAID system (Medical Aid in Dying) has already been bent towards killing people for socio-economic as well as medical reasons (in good Doe fashion by torturing the definition of “medical” beyond recognition). The idea was broached, though quickly pooh-poohed, in debates as to whether Obamacare would lead to rationing medical care, or as Sarah Palin warned, “death panels.” But if the elderly’s dignity does not include some years of economically secure retirement while they might be able to avail themselves of it, how might society redefine their value (while pretending not to get into values discussions) in the future?

Social Security’s problems are economic, but they are not first and foremost an economic crisis. They are a people crisis. It’s imperative we make that clear.