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The ability of the human species to lengthen its lifespan .. has dramatic effects on the need for saving .. The bottom line .. is that the need for savings has grown tremendously in the past fifty years. However, because of Social Security and Medicare, many people feel insulated from this dramatic increase in the need for savings ..

in the middle of the 20th century many economists succumbed to anti-saving bias. John Maynard Keynes saw the "hoarding instinct" leading to reduced demand and unemployment. His followers shared his concern that excessive saving could reduce output and employment. This anti-saving bias was the basis for Social Security's design, in which contributions and benefits were decoupled. Interviewed by Randall Parker in Reflections on the Great Depression, Moses Abramowitz said,

"We wanted to increase incomes, and so demand for goods, and so employment, and so on around. And the structure of Social Security, the fact that benefits were divorced from previous contributions, was part and parcel of the business of supporting demand. We didn't want a Social Security system where everybody paid an employment tax and didn't get immediate benefits from it. We wanted something that paid immediate benefits. But we didn't want to increase saving..."

Social Security has a built-in bias against saving. This was deliberate, based on a Keynesian distrust of thrift. Economists no longer believe that saving is contractionary. Government's largest program is designed to implement a theory that is decades out of date.