You could almost hear the synchronized glottal stops, feel the tremor from the simultaneous snorts.

Last Friday morning, as though a single beast, the news consumers of the U.S. nearly choked on their breakfast muffins. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of Triple Mocha Ultraskim Latte were nasally inhaled at the shock.

For here, marching across the front pages and scrolling down the Web sites, was something few of us had seen in quite a while: a piece of good news!

The New York Times headline caught the crux. "Census Report Foresees No Crisis Over Aging Generation's Health," it read.

And this was not just any old crisis that the experts weren't foreseeing. Over the past 20 years, no subject has riled policy weenies like the Graying of America, the Aging of the Workforce, the Baby Boom Bust, the Coming Collapse in Unfunded Entitlements — it has had many names but a single object: national bankruptcy.

The logic behind this prospective crisis, widely foreseen until last Friday morning, will seem airtight to a layman.

It's a combination of demographics and arithmetic. The baby boom generation was one of the largest in U.S. history — roughly 76 million people were born between 1946 and 1964.

Now they are getting old. And they may get really, really old. Two years from now the first boomers will begin slurping up government-funded retirement benefits. By 2040, according to the Concord Coalition, one of every four Americans will be over 65, and the vast majority of them will be supported, to varying degrees, by government.

They are an expensive bunch, these boomers, partly because they are expected to live so long. The Government Accountability Office estimates that government obligations to retirees over the next 75 years will total $33 trillion in current dollars, costing each worker more than $250,000.

The Census Bureau has taken a second look at these gloomy numbers and found more than a silver lining. The very trends that foretold actuarial doom — greater longevity and the sheer size of the boomer cohort — will not only postpone the day of reckoning but lessen its effects. The future, in other words, may not be what it used to be.

"Many people have an image of aging that may be 20 years out of date," said Richard M. Suzman from the National Institute for Aging, which conducted the report for the Census Bureau.

And that outdated image, he suggests, is the source of the unfounded alarm.

Older people (those over 65) in the next generation will be healthier. Twenty-five years ago, more than one of four old people suffered from a chronic physical disability. Now the figure is fewer than one of five. The proportion of old people in nursing homes has declined.

Older people are richer than before. In 1959, 35 percent lived in poverty. Now it's 10 percent. Their per capita net worth, even apart from Social Security payments, is rising.

And older people are better educated. By 2030, more than 25 percent of the seniors will have a college degree. Higher levels of education usually signify a healthier population enjoying a higher standard of living.

The picture the Census Bureau presents is of an aging generation that will be working (and paying taxes) longer and placing fewer and less costly demands on the healthcare and pension systems than we expected.

Partly this has been simple political opportunism. When President Bush trumpeted the pessimistic data to support his Social Security reform last year, his Democratic opponents felt compelled to rebut the doomsayers and embrace the sunnier scenario, if only to deprive Bush of a political victory. (It worked.)

Yet even the optimists can't avoid some unsettling facts.

For example, while the bodies of aging baby boomers will stay healthy longer, with fewer physical disabilities, there's been no drop in the incidence of senile dementia, even among the physically robust — which may portend an increase, rather than decrease, in levels of care.

Moreover, the changes in the American family shaped by higher divorce rates and declining birth rates threaten to dismantle the most important support system that old people have traditionally been able to count on — suggesting they may be relying more, not less, on government largesse.

And then there are the non-quantifiable questions raised by increased longevity.

As the philosopher Leon Kass has pointed out, an aging society must see its priorities change as it commits more of its energies to accommodating the old than educating the young.

And yet, Kass writes, "a society's aspiration, hope, freshness, boldness and openness depend for their continual renewal on the spirit of youth, of those to whom the world itself is new and full of promise." As the relative numbers of the young decline, that crucial forward-looking spirit may decline, too.

Viewed this way, the implications of an aging society, both good and bad, are too profound for the actuarial tables and thus beyond the Census Bureau's reach.

In the long-established baby boomer fashion, however, we will prefer for now to keep them at bay and enjoy the unexpected good news while we can.

Andrew Ferguson is a Bloomberg News columnist. In 1992, he wrote speeches for President George H.W. Bush.