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The way retirement is done was broken from the start. If you have a fixed age, you will get issues when the population pyramid changes and fewer people are arou

The way retirement is done was broken from the start. If you have a fixed age, you will get issues when the population pyramid changes and fewer people are around to support the retired. What the system ought to be is: 1) Everyone who can't work gets a pension/state support/whatever you want to call it. If you get run over by a car at 25, you are on this list until you die and the state supports you. It's expensive, but there aren't that many people who end up in this state. Maybe a few percent, eg 3%. 2) We set a pensioner ratio. For instance if it's 20%, the 3% of people in cat 1 above get a pension, and the 17% oldest people who aren't in cat 1 get a pension. This would naturally change the age at which people get to retire, moving it up and down depending on birth rates. What we have is not workable. There aren't enough young people for the number of boomers who are retiring, and not only that, the older people turn out more and have more votes, enabling them to force worse conditions on everyone else.

deleted 4y ago
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forgetfreeman 4y ago
Really? Try injecting the majority of hoarded wealth into the equation and re-run the numbers, and then tell us there aren't enough workers to support the system.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  How does the state seize the hoarded wealth when it can just move to a tax haven?
  - bradlys 4y ago
    The state has this thing called the military. If it wants to - it’ll get you back and take your money by force. I figured people would understand that this is an option when people like Jack Ma go missing for a few months.
    - HDThoreaun 4y ago
      They do this and literally every billionaire will immediately leave. Seems a bit short sighted.
      - bradlys 4y ago
        That's the fun part - your military makes it so they can't leave.
        HDThoreaun 4y ago
        Europe has open borders. How is that going to work?
        bradlys 4y ago
        Europe doesn't have open borders... Even if they "left" their home country somehow - extradition treaties are a thing.
        quotz 4y ago
        Youre proposing the military hold hostage billionaires in france until they all sign away their wealth to the state? This is basically post WW2 newly-found communist states, or Mao level of fascism. Think twice before you write stuff like this, most Americans cant even imagine the atrocities that were committed during communist times. Literally read any book about how communism felt like. You're offending millions of people who tried extremely hard to escape communism and live a normal life. I am a post-communism kid whose parents grew up in one...
  - forgetfreeman 4y ago
    Capital flight is a potential risk, true. There are any number of potential remedies on a niceness continuum ranging from using the legal system to freeze assets on the nice end to guillotines on the not-so-nice end. You're encouraged to consult any number of history texts for past examples of wealth transfer from the elite classes.
    - logicchains 4y ago
      >There are any number of potential remedies on a niceness continuum ranging from using the legal system to freeze assets on the nice end to guillotines on the not-so-nice end You do realise the guillotines in the French revolution weren't used on "rich people", they were used on the nobility (ruling class)? And in the times that approach was used on the rich people, e.g. Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, the countries in which it occurred was plunged into decades of extreme poverty and genocides.
lm28469 4y ago
idk man, I've been sold capitalism as this great wealth generating machine, the trickle down economy, the invisible hand of the free market, yadda yadda yadda This isn't a maths equation, it's a societal choice, that's why Macron doesn't get it, he's a bead counter for Maastricht, what he does is making sure the spreadsheet is balanced
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Got nothing to do with capitalism. If you're going to let some people retire, some other people are going to have to pay to support them. That's regardless of whether we're hunter-gatherers, feudal, or post-industrial. What I don't understand is how people can't see through the framing. Do old people deserve to retire? Sure. Who is going to take care of them? Younger people. How do they not get a raw deal out of this?
  - scotty79 4y ago
    Industrial machines pay for us all for at least a few decades. Just some people get more of that money than others.
vikingerik 4y ago
1) Everyone who can't work gets a pension/state support/whatever you want to call it. Of course, this creates a giant perverse incentive to get yourself classified as "can't work". Ask the US Social Security disability system how that goes.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  It's an incentive, but not a perverse one. It's actually a straightforward incentive: you get a meal ticket for life. A perverse incentive is like the Hanoi rat bounty: it creates more rats instead of fewer. There's no way around it though. Either you make a judgement about who gets a pension, or you just let people who've gotten paralyzed in an accident try to fend for themselves.
  - xwdv 4y ago
    We can certainly do more to help paralyzed people be functional members of society. Just because you are paralyzed doesn’t mean you have to be worthless. With advanced interfaces and equipment for instance, a paralyzed person could control delivery robots to help deliver food or items to people, allowing them to earn an income and pay their costs of living and perhaps even invest their money to eventually retire. Or maybe they could just do typical office work, just wouldn’t be with a mouse and keyboard. No reason why they can’t join zoom calls.
pixelfarmer 4y ago
The system is broken, yes, but not how you think. Automation and how automation benefits society (or actually not) is the core issue. "Population bomb" discussions, both in terms of how old people get and population age distribution are just straw man arguments for the much larger underlying issue. I currently live in Germany, like about half of the population is in the age group that is allowed to work. About 1/4th of these work at minimum wage, and I would wager a guess that up to about another 1/4th is either officially declared "unemployed" (the official definition of that gets regularly messed with, guess why) or in a state every normal would declare "unemployed" one way or another. On the other hand you have massive automation everywhere, but taxes for companies are totally different to taxes for people, and the basic idea of retirement is that the current production output is paying the retirement for the current old people. From a large scale view on this it shouldn't be an issue for Germany, but they face similar issues like France and sticking through the status quo doesn't leave many options in the end with a system like that. And yes, it obviously is larger scale, because as you see, it is not just retired people affected by the problem, it is everyone, kids included (their parents being the proxy). Now think about how multinational corpos use nation states for their own benefits and other such stuff and you see that where things are currently heading on the larger scale is actually the worst possible option to fix anything, it just speeds this entire process up towards the breaking point. For all this "intelligence" humans supposed to have, this whole thing is a terrible joke.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

forgetfreeman 4y ago

Really? Try injecting the majority of hoarded wealth into the equation and re-run the numbers, and then tell us there aren't enough workers to support the system.

HDThoreaun 4y ago
How does the state seize the hoarded wealth when it can just move to a tax haven?
- bradlys 4y ago
  The state has this thing called the military. If it wants to - it’ll get you back and take your money by force. I figured people would understand that this is an option when people like Jack Ma go missing for a few months.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    They do this and literally every billionaire will immediately leave. Seems a bit short sighted.
    - bradlys 4y ago
      That's the fun part - your military makes it so they can't leave.
      - HDThoreaun 4y ago
        Europe has open borders. How is that going to work?
        bradlys 4y ago
        Europe doesn't have open borders... Even if they "left" their home country somehow - extradition treaties are a thing.
      - quotz 4y ago
        Youre proposing the military hold hostage billionaires in france until they all sign away their wealth to the state? This is basically post WW2 newly-found communist states, or Mao level of fascism. Think twice before you write stuff like this, most Americans cant even imagine the atrocities that were committed during communist times. Literally read any book about how communism felt like. You're offending millions of people who tried extremely hard to escape communism and live a normal life. I am a post-communism kid whose parents grew up in one...
- forgetfreeman 4y ago
  Capital flight is a potential risk, true. There are any number of potential remedies on a niceness continuum ranging from using the legal system to freeze assets on the nice end to guillotines on the not-so-nice end. You're encouraged to consult any number of history texts for past examples of wealth transfer from the elite classes.
  - logicchains 4y ago
    >There are any number of potential remedies on a niceness continuum ranging from using the legal system to freeze assets on the nice end to guillotines on the not-so-nice end You do realise the guillotines in the French revolution weren't used on "rich people", they were used on the nobility (ruling class)? And in the times that approach was used on the rich people, e.g. Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, the countries in which it occurred was plunged into decades of extreme poverty and genocides.

lm28469 4y ago

idk man, I've been sold capitalism as this great wealth generating machine, the trickle down economy, the invisible hand of the free market, yadda yadda yadda This isn't a maths equation, it's a societal choice, that's why Macron doesn't get it, he's a bead counter for Maastricht, what he does is making sure the spreadsheet is balanced

lordnacho 4y ago
Got nothing to do with capitalism. If you're going to let some people retire, some other people are going to have to pay to support them. That's regardless of whether we're hunter-gatherers, feudal, or post-industrial. What I don't understand is how people can't see through the framing. Do old people deserve to retire? Sure. Who is going to take care of them? Younger people. How do they not get a raw deal out of this?
- scotty79 4y ago
  Industrial machines pay for us all for at least a few decades. Just some people get more of that money than others.

vikingerik 4y ago

1) Everyone who can't work gets a pension/state support/whatever you want to call it. Of course, this creates a giant perverse incentive to get yourself classified as "can't work". Ask the US Social Security disability system how that goes.

lordnacho 4y ago
It's an incentive, but not a perverse one. It's actually a straightforward incentive: you get a meal ticket for life. A perverse incentive is like the Hanoi rat bounty: it creates more rats instead of fewer. There's no way around it though. Either you make a judgement about who gets a pension, or you just let people who've gotten paralyzed in an accident try to fend for themselves.
- xwdv 4y ago
  We can certainly do more to help paralyzed people be functional members of society. Just because you are paralyzed doesn’t mean you have to be worthless. With advanced interfaces and equipment for instance, a paralyzed person could control delivery robots to help deliver food or items to people, allowing them to earn an income and pay their costs of living and perhaps even invest their money to eventually retire. Or maybe they could just do typical office work, just wouldn’t be with a mouse and keyboard. No reason why they can’t join zoom calls.

pixelfarmer 4y ago

The system is broken, yes, but not how you think. Automation and how automation benefits society (or actually not) is the core issue. "Population bomb" discussions, both in terms of how old people get and population age distribution are just straw man arguments for the much larger underlying issue. I currently live in Germany, like about half of the population is in the age group that is allowed to work. About 1/4th of these work at minimum wage, and I would wager a guess that up to about another 1/4th is either officially declared "unemployed" (the official definition of that gets regularly messed with, guess why) or in a state every normal would declare "unemployed" one way or another. On the other hand you have massive automation everywhere, but taxes for companies are totally different to taxes for people, and the basic idea of retirement is that the current production output is paying the retirement for the current old people. From a large scale view on this it shouldn't be an issue for Germany, but they face similar issues like France and sticking through the status quo doesn't leave many options in the end with a system like that. And yes, it obviously is larger scale, because as you see, it is not just retired people affected by the problem, it is everyone, kids included (their parents being the proxy). Now think about how multinational corpos use nation states for their own benefits and other such stuff and you see that where things are currently heading on the larger scale is actually the worst possible option to fix anything, it just speeds this entire process up towards the breaking point. For all this "intelligence" humans supposed to have, this whole thing is a terrible joke.