Scientists have discovered the “Methuselah” genes whose lucky carriers have a much improved chance of living to 100 even if they indulge in an unhealthy lifestyle.

The genes appear to protect people against the effects of smoking and bad diet and can also delay the onset of age-related illnesses such as cancer and heart disease by up to three decades.

No single gene is a guaranteed fountain of youth. Instead, the secret of longevity probably lies in having the right “suite” of genes, according to new studies of centenarians and their families. Such combinations are extremely rare ”” only one person in 10,000 reaches the age of 100.

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In an aging population, the elderly are increasingly being taken care of by the elderly. Professional caregivers ”” almost all of them women ”” are one of the fastest-growing segments of the American work force, and also one of the grayest.

A recent study by PHI National, a nonprofit organization that advocates on behalf of caregivers, found that in 2008, 28 percent of home care aides were over age 55, compared with 18 percent of women in the overall work force.

The organization projects that from 2008 to 2018, the number of direct care workers, which includes those in nursing homes, will grow to 4.3 million from 3.2 million. The percentage of older caregivers is projected to grow to 30 percent from 22 percent.

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The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported.

That’s the finding from a study released Monday by Stanford University’s public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

To put that number in perspective, it’s almost seven times greater than all the outstanding voter-approved state general obligation bonds in California.

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Many more elderly Americans could face…uncertainty in [the] coming years.

A report released Monday by the National Alliance to End Homelessness projects a 33 percent increase over the next decade in elderly people who are homeless.

That would mean that today’s estimate of 44,172 homeless over age 62 would climb to 58,772.

Officials last year counted only nine homeless people over age 65 in Sedgwick County. But 39 people ages 55 to 64 reported being homeless, hinting at the potential for an increase.

The growth could have “huge implications” for everyone and should be seen as evidence that a more expansive safety net of social services will soon be needed, said Nan Roman, president of the alliance.

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The bursting of the real estate bubble and the ensuing recession have hurt jobs, home prices and now Social Security.

This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Stephen C. Goss, chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, said that while the Congressional projection would probably be borne out, the change would have no effect on benefits in 2010 and retirees would keep receiving their checks as usual.

The problem, he said, is that payments have risen more than expected during the downturn, because jobs disappeared and people applied for benefits sooner than they had planned. At the same time, the program’s revenue has fallen sharply, because there are fewer paychecks to tax.

Analysts have long tried to predict the year when Social Security would pay out more than it took in because they view it as a tipping point ”” the first step of a long, slow march to insolvency, unless Congress strengthens the program’s finances.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s New York Times.

While it doesn’t have the voltage it once did, Social Security is still the third rail of politics. Politicians are afraid to touch it out of fear of damaging their careers.

Their decades of cowardice have led us to 2010, the year that Social Security begins its descent into the financial abyss. This year it will pay out $29 billion more in benefits than it takes in through the payroll tax that funds the retirement program.

A Sunday Associated Press report highlighting this deficit suggests that “it’s time to start cashing” in the $2.5 trillion Social Security trust fund that has built up through the decades of the system taking in more than it has paid out.

Only problem: There is no trust fund.

As the story notes, “the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs.”

Read it all and make sure to check out the chart carefully.

While it doesn’t have the voltage it once did, Social Security is still the third rail of politics. Politicians are afraid to touch it out of fear of damaging their careers.

Their decades of cowardice have led us to 2010, the year that Social Security begins its descent into the financial abyss. This year it will pay out $29 billion more in benefits than it takes in through the payroll tax that funds the retirement program.

A Sunday Associated Press report highlighting this deficit suggests that “it’s time to start cashing” in the $2.5 trillion Social Security trust fund that has built up through the decades of the system taking in more than it has paid out.

Only problem: There is no trust fund.

As the story notes, “the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs.”

Read it all and make sure to check out the chart carefully.

States and companies have started investing very differently when it comes to the billions of dollars they are safeguarding for workers’ retirement.

Companies are quietly and gradually moving their pension funds out of stocks. They want to reduce their investment risk and are buying more long-term bonds.

But states and other bodies of government are seeking higher returns for their pension funds, to make up for ground lost in the last couple of years and to pay all the benefits promised to present and future retirees. Higher returns come with more risk.

“In effect, they’re going to Las Vegas,” said Frederick E. Rowe, a Dallas investor and the former chairman of the Texas Pension Review Board, which oversees public plans in that state. “Double up to catch up.”

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A little-noticed law could soon result in smaller Social Security checks for hundreds of thousands of the elderly and disabled who owe the U.S. money from defaulted loans and other debts more than a decade old.

Social Security benefits are off-limits to creditors, such as credit-card companies and banks. But the U.S. can collect debts to federal agencies by “offsetting,” or withholding Social Security and disability payments.

The Treasury currently withholds benefits of 3.1 million Social Security recipients to recover defaulted student-, farm- and small-business loans, unpaid income taxes, amounts veterans owe for health care, and other debts to the government.

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The life of a work-camper, volunteering in places like Falcon State Park in deep South Texas in return for free rent, is not without its bumps. But as Ms. Smith also quickly discovered, the rewards can be deep as well ”” like making cinnamon rolls as part of her job at the camp recreation center, where she and Mr. Smith are working as hosts through the end of March.

“We’re here for three reasons,” she said, as she spread sugar on the dough. “No. 1, we like to travel. No. 2, we like people. And No. 3, we’re on a budget.”

An itinerant, footloose army of available and willing retirees in their 60s and 70s is marching through the American outback, looking to stretch retirement dollars by volunteering to work in parks, campgrounds and wildlife sanctuaries, usually in exchange for camping space.

Park and wildlife agencies say that retired volunteers have in turn become all the more crucial as budget cuts and new demands have made it harder to keep parks open.

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These are tough times for state governments, many of which are contending with huge budget deficits.

Many states are likely to face an especially daunting challenge in the years ahead, according to a report issued Thursday. The states have promised big pension and retirement benefits to their employees without putting aside money to pay for them.

The report was prepared by the Pew Center on the States, and it portrays a state pension system that’s headed for a crisis ”” if it’s not already there.

“The 50 states have racked up more than $3.3 trillion in long-term liabilities in pensions, health care and other retirement benefits that they promised to their current employees and retirees,” says Susan Urahn, the center’s managing director. “But they have not got any money to set aside to pay $1 trillion, which is almost a third of this bill.”

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The Bishop of Swindon has warned that the controversial debate on assisted suicide is in danger of being hijacked by celebrities.

The Right Reverend Dr Lee Rayfield, who opposes calls to relax the ban on euthanasia, spoke out after a TV presenter made an on-air confession that he killed his lover, who was dying from Aids.

The claim, made by Ray Gosling on the BBC’s Inside Out programme on Monday, is being investigated by Nottinghamshire Police.

It follows a separate call by author Sir Terry Pratchett, who lives in Wiltshire and is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, for the setting up of euthanasia tribunals to give sufferers from incurable diseases the right to medical help to end their lives.

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Young children who are regularly looked after by their grandparents have an increased risk of being overweight, an extensive British study has suggested.

Analysis of 12,000 three-year olds suggested the risk was 34% higher if grandparents cared for them full time.

Children who went to nursery or had a childminder had no increased risk of weight problems, the International Journal of Obesity reported.

Nearly a quarter of preschool children in the UK are overweight or obese.

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So though the remarkable decline in the annual Social Security surplus from 2008 to 2009 qualifies as surprising news, the inevitable bottom-line debacles awaiting it and Medicare do not. Anyone capable of doing simple arithmetic — and willing to face the hard truths of a protracted, persisting drop in the workers-to-beneficiaries ratio — could long ago see that those massive federal entitlement programs were unsustainable without comprehensive transformations.

Those needed makeovers grow more costly with every passing year of inaction. Something’s got to give, likely on both sides of the funds collected/funds dispersed equation, or the system will go bankrupt.

That dire outcome will occur even if Washington stops robbing the Social Security trust fund. Nor has that regular raiding kept the regular federal budget deficit from rising to record levels, and the White House budget plan predicts another $1.6 trillion in red ink.

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Social Security’s annual surplus nearly evaporated in 2009 for the first time in 25 years as the recession led hundreds of thousands of workers to retire or claim disability.

The impact of the recession is likely to hit the giant retirement system even harder this year and next. The Congressional Budget Office had projected it would operate in the red in 2010 and 2011, but a deeper economic slump could make those losses larger than anticipated.

“Things are a little bit worse than had been expected,” says Stephen Goss, chief actuary for the Social Security Administration. “Clearly, we’re going to be negative for a year or two.”

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One of the reasons why there seems such a public willingness to accept Mrs Inglis’s actions as not only justifiable, but actually heroic, is that it is widely assumed that a dependent life is a pointless life. In the vast majority of cases, that is not the view of those in such a vulnerable position. The Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in Putney, south-west London, is perhaps the world’s leading centre in this field. One of its senior consultants told me that he has carried out psychological tests measuring self-assessed happiness among his severely disabled patients (most often the victims of traffic accidents): “Where zero is the middle of the happiness-unhappiness scale, minus five the most depressed and plus five the most euphoric, most of my patients indicate ”“ when they are able to ”“ that they are between plus three and plus four.”

The able-bodied seem to find this hard to believe. This lack of empathy masquerading as the opposite can be very dangerous. The wholesale extermination of the handicapped which took place in Germany in the late 1930s is often seen as a purely Nazi phenomenon. Yet that policy could not have been enacted if the German people had not already indicated their acceptance of the idea of “lives unworthy of life”. For example, even before this became official policy, the propagandistic film Ich Klage an! (I accuse!) had been a great hit at the German box office: it described how a court is persuaded to acquit a doctor who had administered a fatal injection to a woman with multiple sclerosis. The jury is persuaded by the doctor asking them: “Would you, if you were a cripple, want to vegetate forever?”

Fortunately, the jury at Mrs Inglis’s trial at the Old Bailey last week were not convinced that such arguments should be a mother’s licence to kill.

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Intensely active older men and women who have the means and see the twilight years as just another stage of exploration are pushing further and harder, tossing aside presumed limitations. And the global travel and leisure industry, long focused on youth, is racing to keep up.

“This is an emerging market phenomenon based on tens of millions of longer-lived men and women with more youth vitality than ever imagined,” said Ken Dychtwald, a psychologist and author who has written widely about aging and economics.

And the so-called experiential marketplace ”” sensation, education, adventure and culture, estimated at $56 billion and growing, according to a new study from George Washington University ”” is where much of that new old-money is headed.

At the Grand Circle Corporation, for example, a Boston-based company that specializes in older travelers, adventure tours have gone from 16 percent of passenger volume in 2001 to 50 percent for advance bookings this year, even as the average traveler’s age has risen to 68 from 62.

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Here is one:

To the Editor:

Re “Weighing the Medical Costs of End-of-Life Care (“Months to Live” series, front page, Dec. 23):

How refreshing to read an article challenging the conventional wisdom that the money our society spends on aggressive medical end-of-life care is wasted. But how chilling to see it portrayed as a problem that when death is imminent, “it may be the patients and families who cannot let go.”

The conventional claim that “the bigger challenge may be changing the ”˜we’re not going to let you die’ culture at places like U.C.L.A.” overlooks the fact that this culture accords with the rational wishes of patients who want to extend their lives as long as possible.

Maybe the bigger challenge is changing the culture that tells us to “chip away” at these patients until they agree to bow out gracefully.

Felicia Nimue Ackerman
Providence, R.I.

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Indeed, after fees are subtracted, inflation is accounted for and taxes are paid, many investors in C.D.’s, government bonds and savings and money market accounts are losing money. In fact, Northern Trust waived some $8 million in fees on money market accounts because they would have wiped out all interest, and then some.

“The unemployment situation and the general downturn in the economy had an impact, but what’s going to happen now as C.D.’s mature is that retirees and the elderly are going to take anywhere from a half to three-quarters of a percent cut in their incomes,” said Joe Parks, a retired accountant in Houston on the advisory board of Better Investing, an organization that works to help people become savvier investors. “It’s a real problem.”

Experts say risk-averse investors are effectively financing a second bailout of financial institutions, many of which have also raised fees and interest rates on credit cards.

“What the average citizen doesn’t explicitly understand is that a significant part of the government’s plan to repair the financial system and the economy is to pay savers nothing and allow damaged financial institutions to earn a nice, guaranteed spread,” said William H. Gross, co-chief investment officer of the Pacific Investment Management Company, or Pimco. “It’s capitalism, I guess, but it’s not to be applauded.”

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The Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center, one of the nation’s most highly regarded academic hospitals, has earned a reputation as a place where doctors will go to virtually any length and expense to try to save a patient’s life.

“If you come into this hospital, we’re not going to let you die,” said Dr. David T. Feinberg, the hospital system’s chief executive.

Yet that ethos has made the medical center a prime target for critics in the Obama administration and elsewhere who talk about how much money the nation wastes on needless tests and futile procedures. They like to note that U.C.L.A. is perennially near the top of widely cited data, compiled by researchers at Dartmouth, ranking medical centers that spend the most on end-of-life care but seem to have no better results than hospitals spending much less.

Listening to the critics, Dr. J. Thomas Rosenthal, the chief medical officer of the U.C.L.A. Health System, says his hospital has started re-examining its high-intensity approach to medicine. But the more U.C.L.A.’s doctors study the issue, the more they recognize a difficult truth: It can be hard, sometimes impossible, to know which critically ill patients will benefit and which will not.

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Elderly couples are buying each other suicide kits as Christmas presents, says controversial euthanasia campaigner Dr Philip Nitschke.

Speaking at Tweed Heads yesterday on a new “peaceful pill” suicide method being developed overseas, Dr Nitschke’s comments sent right-to-life campaigners and church groups into a frenzy.

Asked whether it was in the spirit of the season to be publicising ways of ending life just a week before Christmas, Dr Nitschke said he was always going to attract criticism.

“Our main opposition is from religious groups who would still be getting outraged at Easter, or any other time of year for that matter,” he said.

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Growing old has never been easy. But in isolated, rural spots like this, it is harder still, especially as the battering ram of recession and budget cuts to programs for the elderly sweep through many local and state governments.

Ms. [Norma] Clark has been able to get help since her fall two winters ago because Wyoming, thanks to its energy boom, continues to finance programs for the elderly. But at least 24 states have cut back on such programs, according to a recent report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington research group, and hundreds of millions of dollars in further cuts are on the table next year.

The difficulties are especially pronounced in rural America because, census data shows, the country’s most rapidly aging places are not the ones that people flock to in retirement, but rather the withering, remote places many of them flee. Young people, for decades now, have been an export commodity in towns like Lingle, shipped out for education and jobs, most never to return. The elderly who remain ”” increasingly isolated and stranded ”” face an existence that is distinctively harder by virtue, or curse, of geography than life in cities and suburbs. Public transportation is almost unheard of. Medical care is accessible in some places, absent in others, and cellphone service can be unreliable.

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A sudden crisis is unlikely. Other rich countries with far bigger debts relative to the size of their economies, from Italy to Japan, have soldiered on without hitting a wall. Stable politics, transparent laws and economic dominance give America unequalled credibility with lenders. For all the anxiety the declining dollar drew from China this week (see article), it has no serious rival as the world’s reserve currency. America has sensibly used this fiscal freedom to enact an aggressive stimulus programme. This should be maintained for as long as it is needed.

Yet ignoring the future is also costly. The problem is not the deficits in the next couple of years, but in the years that follow. Uncertainty over how taxes may be raised to shrink deficits may already be weighing on business confidence. Worries about inflation or default could start to push up interest rates. Eventually, private investment will be crowded out.

Barack Obama and Congress can pre-empt such corrosive uncertainty with a plan to reduce the deficit now. Far from requiring immediate spending cuts or tax increases, a credible plan would reassure markets and allow an orderly exit from fiscal stimulus. The Federal Reserve provides a model: it does not plan to tighten monetary policy in the near future, but has signalled its willingness to do so when inflation threatens.

Read it carefully and read it all.

They were “happy, fun-loving people”, full of the joys of life. But, after an evening at a jazz concert with their son and his fiancée, Dennis and Flora Milner returned home and gassed themselves in their bed.

Despite being in reasonable health, they had, at the ages of 83 and 81 respectively, chosen to take their own lives rather than face what they saw as an inevitable decline into infirmity.

Their suicides were a collective, personal decision, but also a political one after a lifetime of activism by Mr Milner.

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The Archbishop of Westminster’s comments come as research exploring the quailty of care provision among the Catholic community found that care home places will have to rise 150 per cent to cope with the ageing population over the next decade.

Latest demographic projections indicated there will be more than 11 million people over 65 within 10 years, with the number of people aged 85 and over projected to reach 3.2 million by 2033.

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This is a nice story–before you watch it, guess the estimated number of grandparents taking care of their grandchildren in America right now.

Now, however, the CBO has determined that Social Security will run cash deficits next year and in 2011, and by 2016 will be more or less in permanent deficit mode. Hot Air has exclusively obtained the summer 2009 CBO report sent to legislators on Capitol Hill but not yet made public, which shows that outgo will exceed income for the first time since the 1983 fix on an annual basis in 2010…

Read it all and follow the links to the discussion by Steve at No Runny Eggs also

The room has a computer with music software on it, but Rivers still composes most of his tunes by hand. And at 85, he still practices two hours a day. He says that in central Florida, he’s experiencing the most creative time in his life.

“I’m getting more ideas now ”” I think I’m far more mentally inspired creatively than I was when I was like 50 or maybe even 40,” Rivers insists. “I have so many more ideas. I have so much more knowledge. It’s great, it’s sort of like the universe: The more you see out there, the more there is. I don’t expect to ever reach my full achievement. I don’t expect to ever have that. Until I pass there’s gonna be, like there’s always more, you know?”

Sam Rivers is happy to spend most of his time in Florida. But he wants to squeeze in one last international tour. And Rivers is also looking for some institution to give a home to his life’s work of more than 300 compositions ”” before they overwhelm the shelves and filing cabinets that have begun to spread beyond his music room.

I caught this one this morning on the way to worship. What a great attitude–the man is an inspiration. Read or listen to it all.

To the long list of reasons American companies aren’t hiring ”” business losses, tight credit, consumer retrenchment ”” add the fact that many of their older workers are unable, or afraid, to retire.

In other parts of the developed world, people are retiring as planned, because of relatively flush state and corporate pensions that await them. But here in the United States, financial security in old age rests increasingly on private savings, which have taken a beating in the last year. Prospective retirees are clinging to their jobs despite some cherished life plans.

As a result, companies are not only reluctant to create new jobs, but have fewer job openings to fill from attrition. For the 14 million Americans looking for work ”” a number expected to rise in Friday’s jobs report for August ”” this lack of turnover has made a tough job market even tougher.

Consider Barbara Petrucci, a dialysis nurse who had expected to stop working soon, or at least scale back to part time. Now that her family savings have been depleted by market declines, she expects to stay on the job for a long, long time.

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