Before retirement
planning was transferred from families to governments, most people worked until
they were too disabled to work and widowed siblings moved back to the family
owned “family home”. The firewall against starvation was family wealth and
income. Family members took care of ailing siblings at home and doctors made
“house calls”.
Before 1913, there was
no Individual Income Tax and no Inheritance Tax in the US. Family farms, homes
and businesses were not lost to inheritance taxes. Allowing families to keep
their money was a motivator within families to be frugal and productive.
Average Life
Expectancy in the US increased by 60% for men and 63% for women from 1900 to
2000. Penicillin was introduced in the 1940s and is the major reason for the
rise in average life expectancy. Contributing to that was the decrease in
still-births and delivery trauma. Average Life Expectancy is a statistic that
takes a death at age 1 and averages it with a death at age 100 and gets an average
of 50. It’s obvious that 60 million
abortions in the US have not been averaged in to US statistics.
Historically, humans
have lived the same lifespans as today from age 1 to age 100 in all centuries
for the past 2000 years. Death from accidents, disasters and wars are added to
deaths due to illness. Death due to illness have declined due to the invention
of penicillin. We have yet to find a cure for cancer, ALS and other illnesses,
so we still have early death from these illnesses.
Statistics are brought
to you by the statistician who drowned in a lake with a mean depth of 3 feet.
The low life expectancy brought to you in the 1800s through 1910 were due to
infectious diseases and wounds that required penicillin before it was invented.
These infectious diseases included black plague, leprosy, syphilis, small pox,
malaria, tuberculosis, scarlet fever and others.
The addition of
chlorine to remove bacteria from water occurred in the 1920s ended cholera,
typhoid, E-Coli, hepatitis and others. Water treatment ended these in the
1920s. In 1930, the US entered a normal period for life expectancy.
Life
Expectancy by Year
Year Men
Women
1900 47
49
1910 49
52
1920 54
66
1930 60
64
1940 62
67
1950 67
72
1960 67 74
1970 68
76
1980 71
78
1990 73
80
2000 75
80
In 1935, the US
government imposed Social Security. The average life expectancy was age 60 and
the retirement age was set at age 65. Employment was assumed to be available to
men who were expected to remain with the same company for life. Companies had
their own Pension Plans for employees who retired from these companies.
A group of egg-heads
decided on age 65 as the official retirement age, because they observed workers
getting slower at age 65. Congress liked
it because they got to spend our Social Security tax money if the average life
expectancy remained at age 60.
But in 1964, Congress
voted to take over paying for healthcare with Medicare and Medicaid. This would
result in a better than 10-fold increase in healthcare, because consumers no
longer controlled the price of healthcare.
It’s never a good idea
to put government in charge of healthcare and pensions or anything else, while
being bribed by these industries. It’s a conflict of interest and costs will
explode.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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