They've been aware of this problem for a long time now, and the solutions are straitforward, but politically unpopular in the US, even though they were dealt with in other western industrialized countries.

The first is to just let people who don't want to retire at 65 keep working. Canada was facing a shortfall of ability to pay pension plan benefits, but they found that by just letting people work for two more years, and retire at 67, then given the wonders of compound interest on the two extra years of pension plan premiums combined with two less years of people drawing on the pension plan, it broke even again.

They didn't force people to keep working until 67... they just dropped the compulsory retirement clauses that were forcing people to retire at 65, so that if someone wanted to retire at 65 they could with no penalty, but if they wanted to keep working they could... they wouldn't be forced to retire (which they used to do, in order to make room for young people wanting to get started, but there's not as many young people being born as a percentage of the population as there used to be, so it doesn't matter so much anymore).

That leads to the issue of *how* those pension plan premiums were invested, and in the case of Sweden and Japan, both of whom have populations who naturally live a long time and, in the case of Swedes, who already have the ratio of elders to young workers that the US is just starting to move into, they allow public pension plan funds to be invested in blue-chip industries, whereas in the US, blue-chip investments are saved for the rich-elite to play with, leaving basic money-market and bond-type investments for pulbic pension plans to work with.

There is no solution if the american elite are going to insist on special access to the investments that produce the good returns, even though those returns are coming from the work of exactly the people who, when they get older, will be needing some payback for all their labour (they do it by calling it "socialist"... and you'd have to live in the US for awhile to see just how comical it is they way they've turned that word into having demonic implications... they did it by confusing everyone into thinking that socialism and communism are the same thing, when in fact there's nothing communists hate more than socialists, but that's another story...) and so for now the politicians are all sticking their heads benieth the sand, but Japan has already given the US a head's up notice that although it has trillions of dollars in savings, that the US is not to come to them to ask for assistance *because* those savings are *already* earmarked for their future elderly.

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