Republican Presidential Debate: Live Coverage

By the way, those same demographic headwinds I just mentioned are a big part of the reason that few economists think Jeb Bush’s 4 percent growth pledge is realistic. Retiring boomers mean fewer workers, which will restrain economic growth.

Huckabee is such a believer in the potential for curing diseases — which he says is the way to save on health-care spending — that he has been a paid endorser for treatments some experts find dubious.

Rand Paul is right that the retirement of the baby-boom generation poses big challenges for the federal budget, and for the U.S. economy in general. But there’s some good news: millennials! Millennials are the largest generation in American history, and they’re now entering the workforce in big numbers. In the short term, the retirement of the boomers will swamp the entrance of the millennials. But over the longer run, the U.S. is in far better shape than Japan or many European countries, which also have lots of retirees but don’t have as many young people coming up to replace them.