Welcome to Peak Rent, the blog and the historically unprecedented event. Mortgage Backed Securities, The Credit Crisis and The Bailout are the Top Story Tonight, but these events only preview a much longer show now opening. The peak in the payroll tax surplus, reportedly this year, is possibly more significant, but we aren't discussing it with the same vigor or much relating it to the Story of the Day. We'll discuss it here, even if most people pay little attention to us.
RDavis provides the following chart to motivate our discussion. I repost it here linked to his site and hope he doesn't mind, since I have no clue who he is. I've researched the same figures, and they've been widely discussed, so you can believe the chart, and even if you don't, the wonders of the internet enable you to verify them yourself.
Why Peak Rent?
It's like Peak Oil, only even more inevitable.
Wikipedia defines "rent seeking" well enough. We'll use the term a lot here. I associate the term with Smith, Ricardo and classically liberal economics, but let's not crowd the boat too much. We're all in it. My libertarian bias will be plain enough, but this blog invites a broad, civil discussion of the issue.
Demography is destiny. The ratio of retirees (persons over 64) to workers (persons between 20 and 64) in the United States will nearly double over the next two decades. The number of workers per retiree will fall to the unprecedented level of roughly 2.5 by 2030, but we'll feel the effects much sooner. The thesis of this blog is that we're feeling them now, but the curtain is only now rising. The show has hardly begun.
Let's talk about it.
