The Chinese Government project their population will peak at 1.45 billion and will fall to 1 billion by the end of the century. They too have underfunded their Social Security system and are worried about less people working to support their parents and grandparents.

We have the same problem because no Congress or President in the last 22 years have had the courage to do anything major. President Clinton and Speaker of the House Gingrich had a fix worked out for at least 75 years. It fell apart with the Monica Lewinski scandal. Our current Speaker Paul Ryan wants people to do more work in bed as he has said. These words were close to those he spoke during a news conference.

As we eliminate diseases, we will live longer and more of us will swell the senior citizen population. This will continue to skew the ratios. Ideally the population ages are like a pyramid. The bigger the base to top ratios the better for the classical economy. That said, imagine the world with 1 billion people or 2 billion people. There was room to grow, resources barely touched, and lots of land to food people and something huge happens or commonsense on family planning occurs. We will have 12 billion by 2100. Americans will number over 525 million.

I remember an episode of Star Trek where the people of a planet were shoulder to shoulder because all diseases had been eliminated; or the movie Soylent Green, a science-fiction movie, where people were recycled for food at 35.

What will life be like with global warming, rising seas, and 12 billion people? We can’t keep kicking this can down the road.