ECONOMY

What Will The 2050 Economy Look Like?

By Maribel Hastings

June 8, 2012 | 10:00 a.m.

A minority-majority is predicted to occur in the United States by 2050. What will the future of our economy look like?

(RELATED: Shaping the Future of Politics)

Christian Weller, an economist and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, says that more young people “means more people in the workforce, more taxpayers, more income for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- that's sort of the basic thing.” 

Furthermore, Weller says, upward mobility into better jobs for minority workers means more tax revenues to pay for safety-net programs. “Creating and finding solutions that are specific to all of the various populations -- Latino, African-American, and subpopulations of Asian-Americans -- to really get them to end the cycle of constantly being stuck in the low-wage jobs.”

By the same token, legalizing undocumented workers would allow those workers, for example, who are currently paid under the table in cash to contribute to Social Security.

“If we created pathways for undocumented immigrants into legal immigration, Social Security's finances would improve substantially,” says Weller. 

That said, even now many undocumented immigrants do contribute to Social Security. Stephen Goss, chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, has said that as of 2007, undocumented immigrants had paid $120 billion to $240 billion into the Social Security trust fund over the program’s history. 

http://nationaljournal.com/thenextamerica/politics/shaping-the-future-of-politics-20120606

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Virtually every issue the United States contends with promises to be affected by deep currents of change illuminated by demographic shifts. With The Next America, National Journal unveils an unprecedented effort to explore the significant political, economic and social impact of profound racial and cultural changes.

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In 2010, Ronald Brownstein wrote The Gray and the Brown: A Generational Mismatch about America’s shift to an older, more ethnically diverse population and how these changes affect us as a nation.