W: The Planner, The Chosen Read Online Free Page B

present this exciting new plan to the community.”
    Janice Highwater had been a professor for most of her life—that was her primary qualification for her job as the assistant to the Assistant Secretary. So she began this class as she had begun all her classes during her twenty-year teaching career—by asking each participant to introduce himself and describe briefly his work experience prior to starting with FMPD.
    When that exercise was finished, she began. “I was a professor of social sciences for twenty years.  I have lectured and written extensively on the needs and challenges that our society will face due to our aging population. When the Administration asked me to join the FMPD, I was thrilled.  This was a chance to work with a great team to put into action everything that I had written as theory. You are now part of that team.
    “I want to start by giving you some background about what we as a country are facing. Our population is aging at a faster rate and as a faster percentage of the population than ever before in human history. In the 1930’s, only seven million Americans were fifty or older—under six percent of the population. About three years ago, we began to see the over-fifty population swell as the first wave of Baby Boomers reached retirement age. In 2012, the U.S. population of persons age fifty and over reached one hundred million people. Studies by the U.N. Population Division indicate that by the year 2035, twenty percent of the U.S. population will be over sixty-five years of age. 
    “Obviously, this has created great challenges for our society and for our government. When the Social Security system was introduced, the average life span was about sixty-seven years. If Americans retired at sixty-five and started collecting their benefits then, they collected for an average of two years.
    “But today, Americans are living longer than ever before.  The fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population is Americans eighty and over. The growth rate for this sector is four times that of the total population. By 2050, we expect the U.S. to have over nineteen million people in the over eighty years of age population group.
    “The average American can expect to live twenty to twenty-five percent of his or her active life in retirement.  Since the year 2011, we have been adding ten thousand new retirees to the Social Security and Medicare rolls per day.  Between now and 2031, our country will see seventy-four million Baby Boomers retire. Right now, the U.S. population of people over sixty-five outnumbers the combined populations of New York, London and Moscow. And this is not just a U.S. phenomenon—worldwide there are more people over sixty-five than the entire populations of Russia, Japan, France, Germany, and Australia combined.  Worldwide, people over sixty-five now outnumber children under age five.
    “Given these facts, we have a huge challenge on our hands. The present system of Social Security and Medicare was created for a society where people of retirement age were a small minority of the population—less than six percent.  These programs were never designed to provide benefits for twenty to thirty percent of the nation’s population.
    “Unfortunately, the politicians did not look up and see that the light at the end of the tunnel was actually an on-coming train until just a couple of years ago. Then, suddenly, people looked around and realized, ‘Hey, we’ve got all these people about to retire and no way to pay for them.’ And after taking a hard look at the numbers, they realized that Social Security was actually going bankrupt. In fact, we realized by 2011 that the Social Security fund would actually be in the red in ten years.
    “The current Administration is dedicated to fixing the problems resulting from an aging population and the Social Security shortfall. We want all of our seniors to be able to enjoy their best years free of the worry and stress of fearing what will