A Stitch in Haste

My father, who turned 70 about six months ago, is on the verge of reaching another amazing milestone:

He served as a New York City Police Officer for 22 years, and has been retired for 21 years. Soon he will have been collecting an NYPD pension check longer than an NYPD paycheck.

On the other hand, maybe that's not so amazing after all:

[Frank Murray] belongs to an elite fraternity, the estimated 71,000 Americans who are 100 years old or older. And their ranks will grow. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that 114,000 Americans will be centenarians in 2010, a number expected to swell to 241,000 by 2020.
...
The average American born in 1900 was only expected to reach age 47, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By 1960, he or she could expect to be around until about 70. Life expectancy has gone up steadily since, hitting 75 in 1990. ...[B]etter treatments for chronic conditions such as heart disease pushed life expectancy to about 78 in 2003.

Meanwhile, Social Security still kicks in at 65-67, with an option to collect reduced benefits at 62. Private defined-benefit pensions still generally follow the "twenty years of service" rule.

And people wonder why there's a Social Security crisis, a private pension crisis, and a government pension crisis?

Congress, meanwhile, is stuck on another bridge to nowhere:

Nearly everyone -- business, labor, Republicans, Democrats -- agrees that something must be done to sustain company-based pension plans and make sure that the federal agency insuring them doesn't become a financial basket case. Getting Congress to agree on legislation is another matter.

The Senate, on the verge of passing a bill several weeks ago, has since stalled, unable to come to terms with several lawmakers, backed by business and labor groups, who oppose requiring companies with poor credit ratings to pay more into their pension funds.

Riskier participants should pay higher premiums -- this is somehow a radical concept?

The insolvency and (subsequent taxpayer bailout) of the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation appears increasingly inevitable, as does some form of "infinite force / immovable object" cataclysm in Social Security now that the Bush Administration has blundered so badly on that front.

Of course, the centenarians who are poised to collect Social Security and pension checks for 40 or more years are not really the core of the problem.

The osteoporosis of a frail old Social Security and defined-benefit pension system, not to mention the feeble-minded dementia of our hack politicians, are the real crises.