George E. Rejda and Richard J. Shepler have made a very valuable contribution in their paper Impact of Zero Population Growth on the OASDHI program' It is important to recognize that, along with the beneficial general effects that ZPG will have, it will also create certain problems. I am in complete agreement with the authors on the factual demographic aspects of their paper, but I cannot agree with them on the economic and philosophical portions of their paper. Certainly, the current presence of ZPG fertility levels augments the long-term increasing cost trends that have always been present for OASDHI. And for this reason, we should be especially careful about not overexpanding the program during the next few decades, when its costs are temporarily relatively low. In passing, it should be noted for the record that the actuarial cost estimates for OASDHI made by the Social Security Administration have always been aware of the possibility of ZPG. In fact, in recent years, when concern about the inevitability of the population explosion for the United States was riding high, the Social Security cost estimates always took the long-range view that ZPG was inevitable at some time. Specifically, ZPG fertility rates were assumed to be operative beginning at the end of this century. The recent experience is thus not by any means completely the reverse of what the Social Security Administration estimates anticipated, but rather only a considerable advancement of the date when the ZPG fertility conditions would occur. The authors develop the result that the real level of OASDHI benefits can be maintained without decreasing the real income of workers remaining after paying Social Security taxes if gross real incomes rise by about 1 percent per year. The authors then go on to argue that the benefit level should have real increases by the Entitlement Theory (which I will turn to later). They point out that a real increase in the benefit level of 1 percent per year could be achieved if there is a 2 percent increase annually in the gross real income of the working population. The authors believe that,