You don't really want to retire, do you?

From the Arizona Republic:

Imagine walking into your neighborhood grocery, hospital or government office and finding that a quarter of its workforce is missing.

Census figures suggest the threat is real, and Arizona is taking steps to avoid it. By 2020, one in four Arizonans is expected to be older than 60, says Melanie Starns, Gov. Janet Napolitano's policy adviser on aging. More than 35 percent of Yavapai County residents already are in that age group.

This year, the oldest boomers turn 62 and become eligible for early Social Security benefits. The thought of millions of boomers taking their early-retirement benefits is causing concern about the stability of Social Security and Medicare.

The article goes on to talk about how much older Americans have to offer, and how retirees and those nearing retirement often find that they really want to continue working -- even if not in the same field that has held their attention throughout their main working years.

Expect to see lots of articles in this vein in years to come, with a particular emphasis on how oddly compelling the prospect of working into our seventies has become to a host of civic-minded seniors with too much time on their hands. The Social Security meltdown is looming, with the Ponzi-scheme pension system due to start tapping general revenues in a little over a decade (that's the so-called "trust fund"). Medicare is in worse shape, approaching total collapse before 2020. That makes it necessary for government officials to do their best to convince people to delay retirement -- and to recruit journalists to the cause.

I shouldn't mock too much, since there's more than necessity to the case for working longer. The fact is that the age of broken and tired 65-year-olds is largely at an end. Older Americans are running, kayaking and bed-hopping with an enthusiasm once reserved for people decades younger. As the Duke University Medical Center reported in 2005, "the majority of people enjoy good or excellent health, even past age 85. Later life is not necessarily defined by a steady decline in health, but rather by more healthy years followed by a much shorter period of ill health immediately before death."

That's good news, unless you've been planning for a retirement much like that of your parents. If you're going to live longer and be able to do more than generations past, you need more money stashed away to support an active life into your 80s.

And that's assuming that you've been doing a good job of planning for the future. Unfortunately, the Congressional Budget Office says, only "roughly half of boomer households are on track to accumulate enough wealth to maintain their current standard of living if the heads of those households retire when they now plan to."

That means that many of those healthy older folks are going to have to spend more of those long, active years than they intended in the work force. That's not really a bad thing. If 70 is the new 55, there's no reason why people who haven't made adequate provisions for their own future should be able to tap other people's income to fund what is now an early retirement. In fact, it's perfectly reasonable to expect that the working years will extend longer than they did in the past, except for those people who specifically plan for a long retirement.

So as much as I roll my eyes at the calculated nature of stories like the piece in the Republic, I have to grant that they're both necessary and inevitable. In the years to come, we'll see an increasingly desperate effort to convince older Americans to stay in the work force, paving the way for a significant hike in the age at which Americans become eligible for Social Security and Medicare benefits. Ultimately, I hope we'll see the end of the poorly considered and doomed Social Security and Medicare systems themselves, so that we never have another crisis like this one.

On the plus side, as we work throughout our long, healthy lives, a lot of us will still be around to counsel future generations to avoid the mistakes of the past.