Did Social Security Cause he Baby Boom?
To understand the effect of ending pay-as-you-go Social Security, perhaps the most helpful starting point is to consider what happened when pay-as-you-go Social Security began. And the first question we must ask is this: Did pay-as-you-go Social Security cause the Baby Boom? This may seem like an odd question, and one difficult to answer. Social Security was enacted in 1935, workers began paying payroll taxes in 1936, the first benefits were paid in 1941, and the Baby Boom began in the 1940s. But the startup of Social Security also overlapped with many other major economic events: the end of the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the beginning of the Cold War, to name only a few. However, the question will not go away. The point on which everyone agrees is that the first generations of workers covered under Social Security received extraordinarily high real rates of return on their contributions. Also, demographers like Richard Easterlin have shown that the chief economic infl
