If a Civil War veteran were born in 1845, served in his late teens, and died at 85, then anyone older than 90 could have spoken to him.

Play with assumptions a bit, or go back a few decades, and the numbers become much less extreme.

EconTalk: John Cogan on Entitlements and the High Cost of Good Intentions http://www.EconTalk.org http://files.libertyfund.org/econtalk/y2017/Coganentitlement...

Ironically, everyone here seems to be angling at the political angle, not the fact that pensions can be easily survive well beyond what they were intended, especially public ones.