It is vitally important to preserve a decent rate of economic growth as the retirement of the baby boomers approaches. Presuming that we do not start eating into our seed corn, the only resources available for workers and retirees in the early 21st century will be produced at that time. We can talk about distributing those resources in different ways, but it will be too late to increase them much. The smaller the pie, the more painful will be given redistributions from young to old.