Of course, that would require an increase in payroll taxes, but I could easily live with that, if the practical result would be that Americans will no longer have to worry about the prospect of pending bankruptcy when faced with a severe and / or prolonged medical problem / crisis.

We do indeed see indications that life expectancy of undereducated white Americans has in fact been decreasing. But overall, the average life expectancy in the United States has increased by nearly ten years during the period 1960-2010, which at the very least means that more of us are reaching our golden years than ever before. And right now, Social Security and Medicare aren't accounting in full for that particular statistic.

I agree with you that to simply raise the retirement age and be done with it is both callous and no practical solution at all, because as you've rightly stated, doing so would tend to adversely impact many of the very people who've come to rely upon these two programs. We're clearly going to have to be a lot more sophisticated, sensitive and multi-faceted in our approach to the problem of program solvency.

(One thing I'd rule out right away is any proposed solution that somehow involves Wall Street, the banks and insurance companies. I'd no sooner agree to offering them a piece of the action, than I would be partial to giving everyone their share of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, and then encouraging them to head off to the nearest casino.)

But we do have to have this discussion, and it's therefore important that as many people as possible get engaged in it, so that we enlarge the pool of potential consensus as we consider various solutions to this problem.

Correspondingly, the worker-to-beneficiary ratio for Social Security and Medicare has declined in our own lifetimes from 5.5:1 in 1960 to 2.9:1 in 2010 -- and is further projected to decrease to 2.1:1 by 2040, if everything remains in place and as is.

I, for one, tend to favor a slight increase in payroll taxes as well as the removal of the $113,000 cap on earnings. I happen to believe that capturing a greater amount of taxable earnings would resolve most if not all of the pending fiscal problems with the trust funds. But honestly, whether or not a majority of people can be convinced that this is a viable solution remains an open question.

I fully understand and appreciate your arguments about age discrimination in this country and its generally negative impact upon older workers in the labor force, and I would urge that we do everything possible to maintain benefits at the levels people have to to expect and rely upon.

But at the same time, I would argue that doing nothing in the face of the looming arithmetic is simply not an option here, nor is drawing political lines in the sand and shouting down any forthcoming proposals an effective solution.

As I said, we need to have a respectful discussion about this terribly important but very touchy subject.

What I learned was: a molder (say someone who makes telephone cases, or electronics cases or chairs) submits a list of requirements to the compositor, ei. hardness, temperature endurance, electrical conductiveness, pliability, color, etc. The compositor brews up a batch of stuff meeting those requirements, reduces back to pellet stage, ships to the molder, and voila! Plastic stuff!