(CNN)  -- "Grow old along with me! /  The best is yet to be, / The last of life for which the first was made." Robert Browning, 1864 How quaint Browning's celebratory ode to aging is these days. Americans seem gripped with dread about an aging society. The alarm "we can't afford it" is ringing loudly all over the place, from congressional hearing rooms to corporate boardrooms to policy think tanks. The reason for the alarm is the federal government's rising tide of red ink. Retirement looms for the roughly 76 million baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964. The oldest members of the Woodstock generation could start collecting Social Security in 2008 and they'll be eligible for Medicare next year. And the core of the federal government's long-term debt-and-deficit problem is entitlement spending.
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Chris Farrell: "We can't afford early retirement" is alarmist; there's no Social Security crisis
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Farrell says public and private pensions depend on economy's 2 percent steady growth
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Mandating older retirement is a step backward, he writes. Wealthy societies don't do that
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The goal should be giving people freedom of choice in the last third of life, Farrell says
Yet with Social Security, and @placeholder in 1965, a majority of aging workers could look forward to a period of fulfillment at the end of their working lives.