10 ms·

The cherry on top is that our parents generation, who made more and had access to cheaper house, education, healthcare, etc., still barely saved for retirement.

The cherry on top is that our parents generation, who made more and had access to cheaper house, education, healthcare, etc., still barely saved for retirement. Unless, god forbid, your parents drop dead early, we are going to be stuck supporting them for a long time.

crdoconnor 10y ago
If the 0.1% can successfully convince people to blame their grandparents and magical robots for stealing all of the country's wealth then this trend is likely to continue.
- rhino369 10y ago
  It's not their fault we make less, but they should have personal responsibility for their own retirement, especially since the massive amount of growth in housing value and the stockmarket over their lifetime.
  - Jach 10y ago
    Social Security lifted the responsibility of saving for their own retirement. It's not much use to blame them for following incentives.
    - lawpoop 10y ago
      You make it sound as if before Social Security, people saved for retirement because they recognized they had to. But of course they didn't-- because they didn't earn enough to save-- just like people nowadays. Social Security is insurance against destitution in old age. It really doesn't function to take away any saving incentive. It just keeps old people from being homeless and starving. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109520630433518093 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109520630433518093 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CEFDE1E38F930A15752C0A9639C8B63 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CEFDE1E38F...
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - Spooky23 10y ago
      Good point. Those lazy bums can just sit in furnished rooms and sell apples in the street.
      - Jach 10y ago
        Um, what? (No seriously, wtf? Is this a reference to something?)
        Spooky23 10y ago
        Should have included a sarcasm tag. Pre social security, it was common for the elderly to end up like that.
  - psadri 10y ago
    Is someone wealthy just because the house they own has grown in value? Practical wealth is how much you have relative to the cost of living. Someone in a $1M house is not necessarily more wealthy than when their house was $100K if all their other living expenses have also grown 10x.
    - shostack 10y ago
      If they are near retirement they could always reverse mortgage it. Our generation will not have that option.
      - mac01021 10y ago
        Why won't we?
        biesnecker 10y ago
        I think the idea is that we won't have the option to help us support our parents, because we'll need to keep living in the house (and haven't finished paying for it so we don't have the equity to borrow from anyway).
        shostack 10y ago
        Because the increasing trend is that it is not financially viable for younger families to buy a home. So they would thus not have a mortgage to reverse in the first place. Rather, they would be stuck paying rent and hopefully have enough savings/Social Security/other income to cover it as long as they needed.
        mjevans 10y ago
        There is also the issue of population growth rates. Future generations CANNOT keep growing like that. Be it by directed reproduction limits or global resource wars/pollution/plagues/extinction from the preceding the population will shrink.
  - pasquinelli 10y ago
    We're talking about people who fall within a certain age range. Personal responsibility is something that makes sense when talking about a person, not a population. To my mind, therefore, personal responsibility doesn't have much to do with good policy.
- pasquinelli 10y ago
  I wish I could up vote this more. Supporting elderly people, or disabled people? These are good things that are good to do. Corporations paying for the negative externalities they dump on everyone else, and for upkeep on the society they owe their existence to? Also good things that are good to do.
jobu 10y ago
Maybe we should hope for more declines in life-expectancy then: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-life-expectancy-declines-for-the-first-time-since-1993/2016/12/07/7dcdc7b4-bc93-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-li...
- thraway2016 10y ago
  Why should we consider life expectancy in the dialysis, nursing-home and hospice era to somehow be a positive measure of societal health?
- mtanski 10y ago
  A older friend of mine who structured financial products said that the worst thing we did for the healt of the Social Secuirty fund was the war on cigarettes. He said it in jest... but he wasn't wrong.
  - mistermann 10y ago
    Oh, I'd love to hear more detail on this if you remember any?
    - Frondo 10y ago
      Probably because smokers tend not to live as long, and therefore draw fewer benefits.
    - pfranz 10y ago
      The TLDR is: smoking and obesity cause you to die sooner with less total medical costs[1]. This is great for things like social security since you can pay in over your entire life but never collect. The story I remember hearing (and couldn't find a specific citation) was that anti-smoking groups made up a bunch of big numbers about smokers' high medical costs to scaremonger. To fight back Phillip-Morris did a study and legitimately found that smokers died sooner and total costs were lower. Unfortunately, that's not something you really want to publicize, so anti-smoking people can keep making up scary numbers and cigarette companies can't really fight back. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.9748884.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.97488...
maverick_iceman 10y ago
You'll be supporting all the old people through Social Security/Medicare anyway.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  I don't judge people who didn't or couldn't save enough for retirement and are living on SS and Medicare exclusively. I like Socialist safety nets of those sorts, and am happy to pay into them. One day I will be old and sick too. We all will be, except those who die early. I judge you if you didn't hold your government representatives accountable for excessive discretionary spending, which was borrowed out of Social Security and will need to be paid back with higher tax rates.
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    Well said. Critics rarely consider the potential personal benefit of SS in the future. Now, it's not a perfect system, but it has its upsides.
    - chimeracoder 10y ago
      > Well said. Critics rarely consider the potential personal benefit of SS in the future. Now, it's not a perfect system, but it has its upsides. Critics definitely consider the personal benefit. The problem is that they don't trust that it'll actually be there, or that it's a system that actually can work as it has been designed. For example, in the 80 years that it's been in effect, the OASDI tax rate has increased sixfold and then some. That increase was fairly steady for a period of time - and the reason it's stagnated recently is not because the tax revenue is sufficient (it isn't) but because political ramifications have prevented the tax rates from increasing. Obviously this isn't sustainable. You can say, "well, the solution is just to raise taxes" - but relying on periodic changes to tax rates is not a recipe for creating a system that can achieve a stable steady state without being subject to political meddling in the long-run. A further problem is that Social Security hinges upon the idea that the current working population will be responsible for paying for the current retiring population. Unfortunately, the respective sizes of these populations can vary dramatically, which means that some generations will end up paying far more than others. People talk about Social Security like it's true time-shifted income (ie, savings), but it's not. One way we've dealt with this so far is to increase the number of people who are paying into the system while remaining ineligible for collecting benefits from it, but that's also not sustainable (and it's also a really horrible way to treat people).
Spooky23 10y ago
The ines that worked for decent companies had a pension. Hell, my grandfather had a defined benefits pension plan for his bar employees.
ryhamz 10y ago
It's hard for me to understand how my ancestors, alive since the beginning of time, reproduced so much that not every person in the family line has a house. Could you imagine working your whole life and end up with not even a shelter to pass on to the person "replacing" you? I never plan to have a kid, but if I did I would feel obligated to give them a head start in this shit life. They wouldn't be fucking renting or taking out loans that's for sure.
- collyw 10y ago
  Isn't a lot of that problem due people moving to cities in the last few decades?

crdoconnor 10y ago

If the 0.1% can successfully convince people to blame their grandparents and magical robots for stealing all of the country's wealth then this trend is likely to continue.

rhino369 10y ago
It's not their fault we make less, but they should have personal responsibility for their own retirement, especially since the massive amount of growth in housing value and the stockmarket over their lifetime.
- Jach 10y ago
  Social Security lifted the responsibility of saving for their own retirement. It's not much use to blame them for following incentives.
  - lawpoop 10y ago
    You make it sound as if before Social Security, people saved for retirement because they recognized they had to. But of course they didn't-- because they didn't earn enough to save-- just like people nowadays. Social Security is insurance against destitution in old age. It really doesn't function to take away any saving incentive. It just keeps old people from being homeless and starving. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109520630433518093 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109520630433518093 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CEFDE1E38F930A15752C0A9639C8B63 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CEFDE1E38F...
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    Good point. Those lazy bums can just sit in furnished rooms and sell apples in the street.
    - Jach 10y ago
      Um, what? (No seriously, wtf? Is this a reference to something?)
      - Spooky23 10y ago
        Should have included a sarcasm tag. Pre social security, it was common for the elderly to end up like that.
- psadri 10y ago
  Is someone wealthy just because the house they own has grown in value? Practical wealth is how much you have relative to the cost of living. Someone in a $1M house is not necessarily more wealthy than when their house was $100K if all their other living expenses have also grown 10x.
  - shostack 10y ago
    If they are near retirement they could always reverse mortgage it. Our generation will not have that option.
    - mac01021 10y ago
      Why won't we?
      - biesnecker 10y ago
        I think the idea is that we won't have the option to help us support our parents, because we'll need to keep living in the house (and haven't finished paying for it so we don't have the equity to borrow from anyway).
      - shostack 10y ago
        Because the increasing trend is that it is not financially viable for younger families to buy a home. So they would thus not have a mortgage to reverse in the first place. Rather, they would be stuck paying rent and hopefully have enough savings/Social Security/other income to cover it as long as they needed.
        mjevans 10y ago
        There is also the issue of population growth rates. Future generations CANNOT keep growing like that. Be it by directed reproduction limits or global resource wars/pollution/plagues/extinction from the preceding the population will shrink.
- pasquinelli 10y ago
  We're talking about people who fall within a certain age range. Personal responsibility is something that makes sense when talking about a person, not a population. To my mind, therefore, personal responsibility doesn't have much to do with good policy.
pasquinelli 10y ago
I wish I could up vote this more. Supporting elderly people, or disabled people? These are good things that are good to do. Corporations paying for the negative externalities they dump on everyone else, and for upkeep on the society they owe their existence to? Also good things that are good to do.

jobu 10y ago

Maybe we should hope for more declines in life-expectancy then: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-life-expectancy-declines-for-the-first-time-since-1993/2016/12/07/7dcdc7b4-bc93-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-li...

thraway2016 10y ago
Why should we consider life expectancy in the dialysis, nursing-home and hospice era to somehow be a positive measure of societal health?
mtanski 10y ago
A older friend of mine who structured financial products said that the worst thing we did for the healt of the Social Secuirty fund was the war on cigarettes. He said it in jest... but he wasn't wrong.
- mistermann 10y ago
  Oh, I'd love to hear more detail on this if you remember any?
  - Frondo 10y ago
    Probably because smokers tend not to live as long, and therefore draw fewer benefits.
  - pfranz 10y ago
    The TLDR is: smoking and obesity cause you to die sooner with less total medical costs[1]. This is great for things like social security since you can pay in over your entire life but never collect. The story I remember hearing (and couldn't find a specific citation) was that anti-smoking groups made up a bunch of big numbers about smokers' high medical costs to scaremonger. To fight back Phillip-Morris did a study and legitimately found that smokers died sooner and total costs were lower. Unfortunately, that's not something you really want to publicize, so anti-smoking people can keep making up scary numbers and cigarette companies can't really fight back. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.9748884.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.97488...

maverick_iceman 10y ago

You'll be supporting all the old people through Social Security/Medicare anyway.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
I don't judge people who didn't or couldn't save enough for retirement and are living on SS and Medicare exclusively. I like Socialist safety nets of those sorts, and am happy to pay into them. One day I will be old and sick too. We all will be, except those who die early. I judge you if you didn't hold your government representatives accountable for excessive discretionary spending, which was borrowed out of Social Security and will need to be paid back with higher tax rates.
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  Well said. Critics rarely consider the potential personal benefit of SS in the future. Now, it's not a perfect system, but it has its upsides.
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    > Well said. Critics rarely consider the potential personal benefit of SS in the future. Now, it's not a perfect system, but it has its upsides. Critics definitely consider the personal benefit. The problem is that they don't trust that it'll actually be there, or that it's a system that actually can work as it has been designed. For example, in the 80 years that it's been in effect, the OASDI tax rate has increased sixfold and then some. That increase was fairly steady for a period of time - and the reason it's stagnated recently is not because the tax revenue is sufficient (it isn't) but because political ramifications have prevented the tax rates from increasing. Obviously this isn't sustainable. You can say, "well, the solution is just to raise taxes" - but relying on periodic changes to tax rates is not a recipe for creating a system that can achieve a stable steady state without being subject to political meddling in the long-run. A further problem is that Social Security hinges upon the idea that the current working population will be responsible for paying for the current retiring population. Unfortunately, the respective sizes of these populations can vary dramatically, which means that some generations will end up paying far more than others. People talk about Social Security like it's true time-shifted income (ie, savings), but it's not. One way we've dealt with this so far is to increase the number of people who are paying into the system while remaining ineligible for collecting benefits from it, but that's also not sustainable (and it's also a really horrible way to treat people).

Spooky23 10y ago

The ines that worked for decent companies had a pension. Hell, my grandfather had a defined benefits pension plan for his bar employees.

ryhamz 10y ago

It's hard for me to understand how my ancestors, alive since the beginning of time, reproduced so much that not every person in the family line has a house. Could you imagine working your whole life and end up with not even a shelter to pass on to the person "replacing" you? I never plan to have a kid, but if I did I would feel obligated to give them a head start in this shit life. They wouldn't be fucking renting or taking out loans that's for sure.

collyw 10y ago
Isn't a lot of that problem due people moving to cities in the last few decades?