MoneySense warns of a war on the family and the peril posed by those pesky oldsters

MoneySense magazine's summer issue, now out, features an examination of what it calls a demographic crisis in Canada, where young Canadian families are not having enough children to pay for the expected costs of providing benefits and service to a growing senior population.

Features editor Duncan Hood says that, while young couples say they want to have 2.5 children, they actually are having only 1.5 on average, after looking at the economic realities. And this has implications for all Canadians whether they have children or not.

"A generation ago, it took just one working parent to generate that median household income," he says. "These days it takes two. The current system is brutally unfair because it focuses on income, not wealth."

The article says that, in 2005, the median net worth of couples with children was $189,000. The median net worth of senior couples was more than twice as high, at $443,600. But it's the seniors who get the tax breaks, even though it's the young families who need them.

Slow growth is a problem because many of our social programs - notably Old Age Security and Medicare - were designed back in the days of tail-finned cars and four kids to a family, says the article.

"Both plans raise money by taxing those who are working," Hood reports. "But since Canada's population is aging, fewer and fewer people are working for each retired senior."

Given the dismal math, the federal government will face two ugly options in the decades ahead, says MoneySense. It can reduce benefits or service to the elderly or it can tax the young even more heavily to support the millions of boomers now beginning to retire.

[Of course there will be boomers who could respond that, as they age and retire, they are entitled to the pensions and services they have paid for in good faith their whole working lives.]