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In the US at least, the original retirement age, set in 1935, was 65. The average life expectancy was 60. Today in the US it's 77.8. In France, it's 82. As pop

In the US at least, the original retirement age, set in 1935, was 65. The average life expectancy was 60. Today in the US it's 77.8. In France, it's 82. As populations age into a higher percentage of retirees, the system is forced to cope with more people who are purely consumers, and contribute nothing to the system. In a post-scarcity world, this would not be a problem, but currently with the oldest generations owning the vast majority of wealth and real estate, and with college, housing, and many costs of living having inflated 3-20x since the older generations were younger, it is a problem. Giving old people money for free when their 10x more valuable houses inflate the market, keeping the younger generation from being able to start families, is a killing blow for population growth and the livelihoods of younger generations.

bjourne 4y ago
At some point we have to rethink what "contributing to the system" means. What are web developers designing ads for online casinos contributing?
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  That’s the nature of social programs. They’re for everyone.
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  Taxes.
- fleddr 4y ago
  Great comment. The status quo is so bizarre. Human life has no inherent value unless it makes continuous contributions to "the economy". It would be economically most efficient to drop dead on the day you retire. Thanks, human! All of this to keep a machine running that wrecks the planet and everything living on it, including ourselves. Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy. At some point we lost the plot. The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.
  - piloto_ciego 4y ago
    Sometimes people fail to recognize that the oldest super powerful artificial intelligence is several hundred years old. It’s our economic system. It’s the software running on all our “wet ware” that convinces us to value productivity and money over human life, the environment, or happiness. It is the paper clip maximizer and it’s happily churning away. But we’re not maximizing paper clips we’re maximizing profits .
    - jtr1 4y ago
      They all like to say the free market is the optimal computer of value until you compare it to runaway AI
    - Dig1t 4y ago
      What does it mean to value human life? I would argue that the economic engine has given us ALL of the improvements in quality of life, and the fact that we live so much longer than we used to, IS valuing human life. There is no other way we could have given ourselves all of the amazing things (tech-wise) we have today. Why would we value the environment over human lives? That just seems like nature-worship.
      - studentik 4y ago
        > seems like nature-worship Why not?
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    > Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy. Obviously this cannot be true. "The economy" isn't some magical object somewhere, but the emergent behavior from all our needs, desires and faults. If something is truly not wanted by anyone, nobody will pay for the work to get done. That's the magic of the invisible hand of capitalism. Doing stuff that truly nobody wants and getting paid for it is usually more of a feature of socialism and bureaucracies. There are cases where individual motive leads to macro behavior that's not desirable by any individual, those are the cases where we need to tax negative externalities or regulate, depending on the problem. These issues usually don't emerge though because nobody wants something but because too many wanting a thing creates side effects that nobody likes. The book Micromotived and Macro behavior by Thomas Schelling covers that nicely.
- tropicaljacket 4y ago
  I understand the sentiment, but in this current system, that counts as contributing because eventually it can be exchanged into something that you consume (e.g. food, housing, healthcare). Even if there were no money and everything works with barters, you'd still have to offer something that other people need. Unless somehow you could survive without requiring food etc from someone else, then they won't force you to "contribute to the system"
- Moissanite 4y ago
  Morals can be exchanged for goods and services!
- xienze 4y ago
  > What are web developers designing ads for online casinos contributing? In the context of this discussion, they're contributing tax revenue. Very important for pension plans!
  - gggmaster 4y ago
    But they are sucking people's lifes.
- cscurmudgeon 4y ago
  They are contributing to entertaining end users of the casino. Entertainment is a valid need. You or some academic in an ivory tower can't dictate worth or contribution. It is determined democratically by actions of consumers (literally voting with dollars). That said, there are some jobs we can easily label as zero wroth. E.g., jobs where people dig pits and fill them up (common in job schemes in socialist countries). These are jobs that powerful folks invent to remain in power by bribing poorer folks. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mgnrega-easy-jobs-may-harmed-054826497.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mgnrega-easy-jobs-may-harmed-... A mega job-guarantee program to alleviate massive rural distress may have had an unexpected, deleterious effect: luring India’s skilled labour away from the organised sector. ... Lured by the lesser effort involved—MGNREGA jobs like digging pits and filling them don’t need any skills—they leave their factory jobs to work for 100 days under the program and then take up other contractual jobs for the rest of the year. Or the famous wages for just looking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokku_kooli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokku_kooli Nokku kooli is a euphemism for extortion by organized labour unions in Kerala under which bribes are paid to trade union activists in exchange for allowing unaffiliated workers to unload their own belongings and materials.[1] This happens with the tacit support of political parties including those in government. In Malayalam, 'nokku kooli', translates into 'gawking wages' or 'wages for (just) looking on'.[2]
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Bullshit jobs are not specific to state capitalist ("socialist") economies - they are a constant of all capitalist systems, as common in big corporations in the USA as they are in China or they were in the USSR. They do tend to take different shapes, but they are a natural effect of corruption, which tends to affect all large organizations.
    - cscurmudgeon 4y ago
      > Bullshit jobs are not specific to state capitalist Yes, but unlike in socialist governments, companies with a lot of bullshit jobs will die due to being inefficient. Thats the point of capitalism. Nobody has to work to support other able bodied humans rent seeking off their labor and capital. But in the US this is not true, as we don't have true capitalism in the US, we have a socialist mix and the govt can sometimes prop up inefficient companies. But in socialism, authoritarians will remain in power for decades even if the majority doesn't like it. Rent seeking is a natural state of affairs in more socialist countries.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- csomar 4y ago
  I think you contribute with real dollars (in Europe case, it's Euros). Whether these euros are derived from a real activity (ie: garbage collection) or a fake activity (ie: finance and eh, politics) or a negative activity (ie: a tobacco company). It's irrelevant.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  The rest of the economy to sell you junk you don't need to keep them employed?
gymbeaux 4y ago
But at the same time I don’t want to be forced into paying say $1M into social security and only live to see $200k come back to me
- jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 4y ago
  Realistically that's what needs to happen. Wealth needs to be redistributed from the old rich to the old poor. Social Security is meant to be security for the old poor, not a middle class pension.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- supernova87a 4y ago
  I thought the idea of Social Security was an insurance program to guard against you outliving your means if you live long enough, not an I-get-paid-back cash-out of your payments. Aren't you having a fundamental misunderstanding about what the purpose of SS is? And not sure if you know, but the dollar figures are more like: Max pay into the program: ~$300k over your 40 year working life (if you maxed out the contribution cap, 6% tax on $167k currently) Max payout from the program: ~$600k (if you draw the maximum when you retire and luckily live a long time, ~20 years) Not "paying in $1m, and only getting $200k", by a long shot. I think it's quite in the opposite direction of how you think you're being taken for a ride.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    > I thought the idea of Social Security was an insurance program to guard against you outliving your means if you live long enough, not an I-get-paid-back cash-out of your payments. Is that a fundamental misunderstanding about what the purpose of SS is? Yes, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of social security. Social security isn't insurance or an investment, it's a tax that's presented as an insurance or investment in order to make it more palatable. The social security tax rates were set with the demographics and life expectancies in mind decades ago. And now that these demographics and life expectancies have changed we'll either have to drastically increase the tax workers are paying, or drastically cut the amount that people withdraw.
CamperBob2 4y ago
As populations age into a higher percentage of retirees, the system is forced to cope with a more people who are purely consumers, but contribute nothing to the system. Also interesting that the inflationary effect of this phenomenon is starting to be recognized. A large fraction of the population has nothing to do but sit around spending money. I'd never considered this point before now, but hopefully the Fed takes it into account when they decide how much to hose the rest of us with high interest rates (which the Boomers also DGAF about.)
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  The problem isn't that retirees spent too much money. Most money gets spent by people in middle age who have kids, active income and no choice but spend the money. Retirees typically try to be prudent. This is why you see the large export numbers with comparatively low imports in countries with low birth rates in parts of Asia and Europe. Very productive people with no kids spending little of their money and soon stopping to contribute and cut down on spending to brace for the long haul. (source: numerous Peter Zeihan interviews and videos) Still will lead to inflation though, as you point out, since production will drop. I also wonder what that means for index funds and the stock market in general. Every month massive amounts of retirement savings get directed there because there is really no other place to invest. What is gonna happen when contributions turn into withdrawals?
game_the0ry 4y ago
> As populations age into a higher percentage of retirees, the system is forced to cope with a more people who are purely consumers, but contribute nothing to the system. Sort of off topic, but I do agree that the older generations in the western world, particularly the american baby boomers, act sociopathic as a group. There is a good book about this: A generation of sociopaths. [1] Sad to watch an entire generation hate their children and grandchildren (if they even have them). Believe me, I do not enjoy painting an entire group of people with a shit-stained brush, but it is what it is and it should be called out. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Generation-Sociopaths-Boomers-Betrayed-America/dp/0316395781 https://www.amazon.com/Generation-Sociopaths-Boomers-Betraye...
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  If we’re playing that game, then this diagnosis is coming from a group with severe anxiety.
  - KyeRussell 4y ago
    This being any sort of ‘tit-for-tat’ response is coincidentally a pretty ‘boomer’ take on mental health. Anxiety can be (and is often) situational, and anxious situations can be a catalyst for general anxiety disorder, etc. I’m not gonna sit here and pretend to know what it’s like to be an average income earning millennial, even though I am a millennial. But the fact that I’m sitting here on my nice fat tech worker salary (after still finding it quite hard to buy a house), supporting my partner who is studying and working part-time, and am still feeling the pinch of inflation, makes me completely sympathise with those earning less than me that are surely freaking the fuck out.
    - nonethewiser 4y ago
      What about observing a trend is a boomer take?
  - justinclift 4y ago
    > ... from a group with severe anxiety. Maybe they have a good reason for it, which is the point? :p
nonethewiser 4y ago
Stop Social Security. It’s literally a ponzi scheme that’s justified by the fallacious reasoning of “well I paid into it.”
spywaregorilla 4y ago
That's just because people died young. The mode (most common) age of death was over 75 in France for men in 1930. I'm not sure how WWII factors into that. It's now about 82, eyeballing it (yes, still higher). https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPU_1204_0683--the-most-frequent-adult-length-of-life-i.htm https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPU_1204_0683--the-mos... People were not "old" and dying at appreciably higher rates given they reached age 60 back then. The general premise that there's a lot of rich old people now is true. But the factors that have raised life expectancy are probably working against this trend, and to minor effect, as they primarily raise the current number of kids.
- gleenn 4y ago
  My understanding was that almost all countries with advanced economies are experiencing negative growth in producing children. So even if you are right about the nuance in age, go look at Japan. Their population is shrinking.
  - notch898a 4y ago
    Purely economically, only a total moron would have a child. Child labor has been outlawed and society says the (grown) child is their cash cow not yours, so the retirement from taxing the kid is spread across everyone else. Meanwhile you're asked to pay the lions share of the investment for everybody else to cash out on. So the name of the game is to let everybody else have the kids and free-ride the fuck out of that by paying some token contribution like the property tax for their grade school or whatever and then taking advantage of their tax dollars when you get older. This is a huge departure from almost all of human history except the last 100 years in the developed world, where the family formerly was the safety net so these kind of investments and arrangements stayed in the family leaving a much stronger economic incentive for children.
    - tnel77 4y ago
      As a parent, you are 100% correct. I love my kids and I’m saving like mad for them, but the future is, frankly, bleak for young people.
tomcam 4y ago
> Giving old people money for free Didn’t they pay into Social Security?
- Uvix 4y ago
  No - Social Security for the people who are already retired is paid for by the people who are currently working. Nobody is "paying into" anything.
  - kasey_junk 4y ago
    Not sure why you are getting downvoted. At least in the US Social Security is a benefits program like Medicare, Medicaid, Snap, etc. It has special accounting rules for Congress but that’s about the only difference. It’s not a forced retirement savings scheme where you “pay into” it. At anytime Congress can change what the benefits are and the only reason it hadn’t happened yet is because it’s such a popular welfare program.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    I am trying to understand this. What were the mini tens of thousands of dollars I paid to the federal government over a period of 40 years in the form of Social Security taxes then?
    - jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 4y ago
      It's a tax. That money is spent and gone. You no longer have any claim on it. If you live long enough, you may get to claim tax money paid by other workers, but that has nothing to do with what you were taxed.
    - jandrewrogers 4y ago
      Social Security taxes are just ordinary income taxes, no different than the rest of the income taxes you may have paid. It does not entitle you to anything. This was settled by the US Supreme Court in 1960.
    - ryeights 4y ago
_8j50 4y ago
First of all, you don't freaking need your own new house to start a family. In most countries most people never buy a new house. Second, wealth is not zero-sum, there isn't a magic pot of gold redistributed between people. As value and demand are added to the economy, so is wealth because the new young people with demands can provide skills or time to be used in value creation and then they also (and older folks that are not creating value because they are not working) can consume and create demand which defines the amount of wealth they create. Poor old people are a net negative but rich old people create demand and thus wealth for value creating youth, unless of course they have everything they need and live in the woods or something. But even poor old people need to eat and have health care demands that young people provide. The forest you are missing for the trees here is the greed of corporations who are not increasing wages to keep up with not just inflation but the value young people are creating. Things like labor unions are a joke in the US and politicians need corporations like fish need water. So the profit margins of companies and the wealth of shareholders is increasing as a result of the young people who are creating that wealth and giving it away to them because they can't collectively bargain and say they want fair pay. as individuals they can be replaced easily if they don't like the compensation. So this whole old people vs young people and millenials destroying things and boomers hoarding wealth and all that is bullshit. The education in the US is shit, you can't compete in a global economy and keep up with wealth creation as a result (still at the top but getting closer to stagnation). And the US is essentially and oligarchy at this point. The richest country in the world and it is the rich share holding class that only care about amassing enough wealth that their descendants will make it through whatever shit the country goes through, so they don't care how much americans suffer or get robbed in day light. This comes down to democracy being a game of information. Whoever controls information controls democracy and this means two things, education and media. You have so many idiots even young ones fall for the trump bullshit because of education and media/social media bubbles and it isn't an accident that education is shit either, it isn't an accident that racism and xenophobia and other hateful things are the tools the ruling class uses to manange democracy. America embraced greed as a way of life and the greedy rule and we are finding out why greed is evil in all forms as If we are part of a fable people will tell their children ages from now to teach them to avoid greed and pride. But not all hope is lost, information and disinformation are education and self education are still popular thanks to the internet. Americans need to pursue truth and justice and fight evil because nothing built on lies and evil lasts. Democracy can still work, but if the voters embrace greed, the the result is what you see. Ask most americans what they think of basic welfare and they'll tell you it's just black people being lazy and taking from the government (in reality it is mostly not black people but why does race matter at all?). We all know greed and hated are wrong, we can't blame corporations and politicians when we choose hatred and greed, these things must be adressed before you can change the way things are done and have fair wages and a stable democracy and solve so many other major issues in the US. Forgive the long post, let me know if you disagree.
eweise 4y ago
If you're referring to social security, that money is not free at all. People pay into the system for 40-50 years so they can get a fraction of it back in retirement. Regarding college inflation, that's purely caused by young people taking out loans. Don't do that. My kid is taking a good number of his classes at the community college. If y'all started shopping for the cheapest way to get an education, costs would come down.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ericmay 4y ago
  If that happened en masse then the universities you ultimately want to attend will start requiring their courses and not accepting transfer credits or something else. Not saying it’s a bad idea or anything to take classes and then transfer them in.
jtr1 4y ago
1. At least in the US, contributions to social security stop once you hit 160k, making it a regressive tax. Raise that cap and like magic, the system is solvent. 2. Growing home prices come from a lack of supply. And you’ve completely flattened an entire generation into one wealth class, which is a gross distortion of the facts.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  Wow, I'm old. In my brain, it used to be about 80K. That was a long time ago! Here is the official history: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/cbb.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/cbb.html The jump between 2022 and 2023 is huge.
  - simoncion 4y ago
    > The jump between 2022 and 2023 is huge. It's not that far off from actual inflation during that period (and inflation that is currently ongoing).
- mynameishere 4y ago
  That doesn't make it "regressive". The untaxed dollars after 160k don't count towards benefits. Rather, the tax is extremely progressive due to the various "bends". As you contribute more into the system, they make the per-dollar value of your contributions go from .9 to .3 to .15. Anyway, Social Security is fine. It's Medicare/Medicaid that's going to nuke the budget.
  - YokoZar 4y ago
    The payroll tax is an income tax with the following brackets: 0-147k: 12.4% 147k+: 0% The number goes down at the higher income bracket, which means you pay less % of your money in payroll taxes the more you make. That is the very definition of regressive.
    - jandrewrogers 4y ago
      Those aren’t the only tax brackets high earners are subject to. Aggregate tax load is roughly still progressive. That aside, as a matter of policy, uncapping the taxes would destroy the popular notion that the amount of Social Security you receive reflects your contributions. If the public believed it was literally just income tax, and if there was no cap there would be no reason to not just adjust the income tax by that amount, it would be subject to the same politics as income taxes and could be cut on a whim. Treating it differently than income taxes, even when it is not, is essential for its survival. If they didn’t cap it, top income tax rates would be >60%, and there isn’t much appetite for that.
jmyeet 4y ago
So a lot of people will label you a conservative because that is a conservative take but I've come to understand that you're simply American and your views are normative for an American. American normative positions are inherently right-wing. Corporate profits in the US amount to about $10T/year [1]. You can and should view this as an estimate of the surplus value of labor that is being extracted. This amounts to $36,000 for every adult (~275M) in the US per year. We could absolutely afford an unimaginable increase of standard of living for retirees and workers. We simply choose not to. [1]: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/corporate-profits https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/corporate-profits
makeitdouble 4y ago
> Giving old people money for free when their 10x more valuable houses inflate the market Aside from that money not being "free", the important part of your observation is on the housing price and how the market works I think. These are IMO way more important issues than wether elderlies should work until 65 or 95.
zouhair 4y ago
> contribute nothing to the system. Maybe the system needs to adapt to humans not the other way around. Why human worth is only linked of how much money they make? It's dystopian.
dangwhy 4y ago
> . Today in the US it's 77.8. In France, it's 82. Its 73.5 for males. you only have 8 years after retirement :/ https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/life-expectancy.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/life-expectancy.htm
- z2 4y ago
  Actually, with conditional probability, if you can make it to 65 as a male, you're expected to get 18 more years. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
pdntspa 4y ago
> and contribute nothing to the system I'm sorry but I've contributed a fuckload of money to this system and I better be getting the value I paid for out of it when it comes to that time. These people are not 'consumers'
- throwaway1777 4y ago
  Doesn’t matter how mad you are about it. You likely won’t get out what you put in.
hungryforcodes 4y ago
But what will you say when you are 60 or 65? These people are not contributing during retirement, but HAVE contributed in the past. In fact people pay (especially in places like France) into a government retirement fund. And this happens over 20-40 years of work. This is a long time and if properly managed, should be fine. So people aren't just being given "free money", this is something that they have paid for and so they are protesting, because it's basically a kind of service that they have been promised in exchange for being taxed each pay check. But I still come back to the question of what you will do at retirement?
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  But it wasn’t properly managed. It was spent immediately, with IOUs written to replace it. There is no retirement “fund” in the way that word implies.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    That is the government's problem, not the workers'.
    - hungryforcodes 4y ago
      Hence the legit protests.
    - jbn 4y ago
      > There is no retirement “fund” in the way that word implies well, France really has 2 systems (to simplify, it's really more like 42+), the "public" one (i.e. civil servants) and the "private" one (i.e. anyone employed by an employer other than the state). The "public" retirement is based on the assumption that the state guarantees its liability for future pensions but doesn't actually put it on the books (if it did real debt would be another 2,000 billions euros), while the "private" retirement does have a "fund" (really several of them, one per sector of the economy) but it's revolving money put in by the current workforce but paying immediately current pensioners. This second system can in theory have excess money (but every time it does, a law is passed to extract some more money out of it to the benefit of the first!). Part of the issue in France is the existence of these 2 systems and the very fact that the state allows itself to do its accounting differently (in a way that unlawful for anybody else). If at least the state played by the same rules... (of course then it would have to recognize this extra debt of 2,000 billions euros, and that would disqualify the country from the eurozone!). But in short, yes it is very much the government's problem. They (since 1945) have "organized" pensions in a way that makes them a time bomb both in its accounting, and in its unjust rules (rules vary a lot per sector of the economy).
m463 4y ago
> "Giving old people money for free " uh, didn't the old people finance their own social security? Didn't they give up money their whole lives to finance their homes? Don't they contribute to society in other less-measurable ways? That said, there could be some ways to retire, but be able to work in such a way that retirement is not adversely affected. Some of my friends who retired had to carefully not work or social security was adversely affected.
- astrange 4y ago
  > uh, didn't the old people finance their own social security? No, that's the original marketing but the payments you get out of it aren't related to the ones you put into it i.e. they're just a tax to fund the program.
  - skrause 4y ago
    Really depends on the country. In Germany the payments you get out of it are related to the ones you put into it and are separate from the taxes.
    - manuelmoreale 4y ago
      Same in Italy but it’s related to how much you paid, it’s not the same money. The money I’m currently paying are used to finance pensions to people retired now. When I’ll retire (will never happen at this rate) I’ll get a pension that’s based on how much I contributed but the money will come from people who will still be working.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- majormajor 4y ago
  > In the original Act benefits were to be paid only to the primary worker when he/she retired at age 65. Benefits were to be based on payroll tax contributions that the worker made during his/her working life. Taxes would first be collected in 1937 and monthly benefits would begin in 1942. (Under amendments passed in 1939, payments were advanced to 1940.) That's from https://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html https://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html - so generally, the old were financed by the younger at inception, and that's basically continued ever since. Nobody funded their own SSN fully between 1937 and 1940. That sort of insurance is still a good idea. The "house" part of the person you're replying to's post is interesting: "Giving old people money for free when their 10x more valuable houses inflate the market" By definition, anyone whose house is 10x more valuable than it was when they bought it is not inflating the market. The people buying at the new price are the ones driving the current valuation of that house. But constrained supply does also come into play; and other forms of social assistance are conditional on income levels and such; it wouldn't be totally unreasonable or unprecedented to make some benefits conditional on assets in cases like that - if you're sitting on a 900k asset, maybe leverage that first if you don't otherwise have any savings? And in doing so, open up that spot for a younger generation that still has to commute, etc?
partiallypro 4y ago
It's less about wealth of the oldest generation and more about the fact that we don't have a good replacement rate from reproduction or immigration. Birth rates around the world are not even at replacement rates. The entire retirement system is built on the idea that younger workers will chip in to pay for the elderly, but...we can't do that at scale, because there won't be enough people. There are still a lot of older poor people now, and caring for them and end of life care is incredibly expensive. Even "rich" people now will be poor by the time they die, especially in the US. A huge portion of US inheritance will evaporate paying for parents aging.
csomar 4y ago
So it's everyone's fault but... I don't get it. The system is a ponzi scheme. It was bound to have issues while benefiting the early players. Why not admit that?
- rahen 4y ago
  Because once you're invested in a Ponzi, you lose it all when it crumbles. It will, ineluctably, but if you can push the date further, then maybe you can get away with it. To postpone its fate, they'll advocate for a harsher taxation of their neighbor and the business next door so they can profit from them the most ("I know they have money, while I'm so poor you know..."). They also need newcomers in the pyramid, so they advocate for more recruits. Then they will call that "solidarity" so they don't have to face their short-term, greedy mindset, the same they blame others for.
grog454 4y ago
> with the oldest generations owning the vast majority of wealth and real estate, and with college, housing, and many costs of living having inflated 3-20x since the older generations were younger, it is a problem. This is one "benefit" of inflation. Whatever you did 50 years ago in exchange for your wealth isn't worth as much to society today as it was back then, in general. So you can continue to do something productive or hope you were productive enough before you retired that your compensation lasts.
jmoak3 4y ago
This is summed up nicely. To add, simply take a look at the % of USA federal spending that goes to Medicare and Social Security, which are benefits for the over 65 population. It's 1/3rd. 1/3rd of Americans are also over the age of 55, which will push that number higher. We are consuming our young. As a 29 year old, unless technology advances radically and I have positions in the companies controlling it, I will not get what I put in. There are many advanced economies in worse positions. France for example spends ~15% of it's total GDP on pensions alone. We can all blame whatever severely rich people exist, however the death by a thousand cuts brought on by too few supporting too many is the root of the issue. The worst part is, many of these supported elderly aren't even able to live decent lives.
- hedora 4y ago
  Social Security isn’t federal spending. People pay into the trust fund, then withdraw when they retire. It is set up so that it cannot run a deficit. However, congress raided the social security fund, spent the money, and now they are deflecting blame away from themselves by claiming the system was insolvent by design.
  - junofan 4y ago
    It’s federal spending. The Social Security Administration’s website clarifies that misconception [1]. [1]: https://www.ssa.gov/budget/?tab=0 https://www.ssa.gov/budget/?tab=0
xvilka 4y ago
The good example of the extreme skew is Japan, when government optimizes their policies in favor of old people at the expense of young people who can't even influence the policy enough.
crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
> and contribute nothing to the system This is an ageist perspective and foundational to what you've written. Older people have a lot to contribute and it's unmeasured. The same goes for partners who stay at home with young people instead of working. They're DEEPLY contributing without pay. You're going after old people in a faux-scarcity world. How about you take on the collective issues, like capitalism choosing to gatekeep resources behind labor?
- yunohn 4y ago
  Their perspective also ignores the fact that previous generations built the world that current and future generations continue to develop. We all stand on the shoulders of giants…
dv_dt 4y ago
We are living in an artificial scarcity world is more of a problem than us not having enough capacity to sustain retirement and increase leisure time of the pre-retirement demographics. Technologically, imho we have been beyond a post scarcity level for quite a while - its our economic system and its poor allocation of wealth and resource allocation that is antiquated, irrational, and constraining the system. Austerity is just giving up at actually building the system in the ways needed for more people to retire or even live out their lives avoiding things like climate change.
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  Austerity is the neoliberal elites like Macron way of feigning poverty. They want a small, weak government, powerful businesses, and an impoverished society completely dependent on their whims and generosity.
  - rahen 4y ago
    Any government wants power, money, and having society depend on them. The bigger and more powerful the government, the more they can do. Same with companies: the larger the more annoying, but at least you can choose them, and there's competition. Not so much with governments, they just act like a powerful monopolistic megacorp. The goal is to make power decentralized, not further concentrated in a few hands, especially not a government that can get away with it as much as they want, and even use violence, contempt and oppression if needed.
    - dv_dt 4y ago
      I am skeptical that blanket decentralization works without some central framework to maintain it. Otherwise power still accumulates and without some enforcement of openness and a collective discussion - corruption also grows perfectly fine without government involved. See decentralized crypto industry as a microcosm. I would say that government and a healthy protest of government as the French are exercising is one way to check the over accumulation of oppressive power.
Reptur 4y ago
Those who set it know that people in lower socioeconomic status won't live until 77.8. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170131190102.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170131190102.h...
p4bl0 4y ago
Your message is wrong on so many levels I don't really know how to start. First, average life expectancy is absolutely not an interesting measure. You should at least look at the average age up to which people are alive and in good health. And this is much lower. Also, life expectancy is very different depending on your social class. Construction workers die much younger than software engineers. And this is even more true regarding life expectancy in good health. By increasing the age at which one can retire, what you actually do is to make the poorer contribute to retirement money they won't be able to benefit of because they'll be dead before or soon after while the rich will enjoy their retirement since they live longer in good health. Concerning the whole there is more old people thing: yes, there is, but at the same time workers have never been as productive as they're now. And France as never been as rich as it is now. There is no technical problem here, just a political choice. The Cor (Conseil d'orientation des retraites, which is the official institution that studies retirement in France with projections into the future etc) says our retirement system is currently stable with no real risk to its equilibrium (actually there is one scenario over four in which it may temporarily have a deficit in a few years but that resorbs itself over a few years as well — and you have to know that a few years back they made projections and were quite pessimistic for the situation today, but the reality is that nowadays our retirement system is afloat and well, with multiple billions in positive this year for example). Also, there are solutions if we need more contribution to retirement fund: one of which is to increase wages, another one of which is to pay women the same as men (in France the gap is still between 15% and 20%), another one is to tax the richest more, or simply to politically accept to keep the portion of GDP we spend on the elderly the same rather than wanting to keep the absolute amount the same or lower (which is what Macron wants). Finally, retirement pension is not "giving people money for free". Retired people are not "just consumers", they contribute a lot to society, even if from a capitalist point of view it is not directly visible: more than a third of the volunteering in (quite sadly, indispensable) non-profit is done by young retirees who can still do it, almost half of baby-sitting is done by grand-parents who can do it because they're retired, etc. What kills the livelyhoods of younger generation is small wages, no political control over rent prices, a partly artificial inflation which main effect is to make everyone pay more at the supermarket to enrich shareholders who bet on the inflation even more, and soon, if this law passes, it will be the burden of having to take care of their parents who could not work til the increased retirement minimum age for health reasons and will therefore have way too small pensions to be independent.

bjourne 4y ago

At some point we have to rethink what "contributing to the system" means. What are web developers designing ads for online casinos contributing?

nonethewiser 4y ago
That’s the nature of social programs. They’re for everyone.
KptMarchewa 4y ago
Taxes.
fleddr 4y ago
Great comment. The status quo is so bizarre. Human life has no inherent value unless it makes continuous contributions to "the economy". It would be economically most efficient to drop dead on the day you retire. Thanks, human! All of this to keep a machine running that wrecks the planet and everything living on it, including ourselves. Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy. At some point we lost the plot. The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.
- piloto_ciego 4y ago
  Sometimes people fail to recognize that the oldest super powerful artificial intelligence is several hundred years old. It’s our economic system. It’s the software running on all our “wet ware” that convinces us to value productivity and money over human life, the environment, or happiness. It is the paper clip maximizer and it’s happily churning away. But we’re not maximizing paper clips we’re maximizing profits .
  - jtr1 4y ago
    They all like to say the free market is the optimal computer of value until you compare it to runaway AI
  - Dig1t 4y ago
    What does it mean to value human life? I would argue that the economic engine has given us ALL of the improvements in quality of life, and the fact that we live so much longer than we used to, IS valuing human life. There is no other way we could have given ourselves all of the amazing things (tech-wise) we have today. Why would we value the environment over human lives? That just seems like nature-worship.
    - studentik 4y ago
      > seems like nature-worship Why not?
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  > Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy. Obviously this cannot be true. "The economy" isn't some magical object somewhere, but the emergent behavior from all our needs, desires and faults. If something is truly not wanted by anyone, nobody will pay for the work to get done. That's the magic of the invisible hand of capitalism. Doing stuff that truly nobody wants and getting paid for it is usually more of a feature of socialism and bureaucracies. There are cases where individual motive leads to macro behavior that's not desirable by any individual, those are the cases where we need to tax negative externalities or regulate, depending on the problem. These issues usually don't emerge though because nobody wants something but because too many wanting a thing creates side effects that nobody likes. The book Micromotived and Macro behavior by Thomas Schelling covers that nicely.
tropicaljacket 4y ago
I understand the sentiment, but in this current system, that counts as contributing because eventually it can be exchanged into something that you consume (e.g. food, housing, healthcare). Even if there were no money and everything works with barters, you'd still have to offer something that other people need. Unless somehow you could survive without requiring food etc from someone else, then they won't force you to "contribute to the system"
Moissanite 4y ago
Morals can be exchanged for goods and services!
xienze 4y ago
> What are web developers designing ads for online casinos contributing? In the context of this discussion, they're contributing tax revenue. Very important for pension plans!
- gggmaster 4y ago
  But they are sucking people's lifes.
cscurmudgeon 4y ago
They are contributing to entertaining end users of the casino. Entertainment is a valid need. You or some academic in an ivory tower can't dictate worth or contribution. It is determined democratically by actions of consumers (literally voting with dollars). That said, there are some jobs we can easily label as zero wroth. E.g., jobs where people dig pits and fill them up (common in job schemes in socialist countries). These are jobs that powerful folks invent to remain in power by bribing poorer folks. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mgnrega-easy-jobs-may-harmed-054826497.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mgnrega-easy-jobs-may-harmed-... A mega job-guarantee program to alleviate massive rural distress may have had an unexpected, deleterious effect: luring India’s skilled labour away from the organised sector. ... Lured by the lesser effort involved—MGNREGA jobs like digging pits and filling them don’t need any skills—they leave their factory jobs to work for 100 days under the program and then take up other contractual jobs for the rest of the year. Or the famous wages for just looking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokku_kooli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokku_kooli Nokku kooli is a euphemism for extortion by organized labour unions in Kerala under which bribes are paid to trade union activists in exchange for allowing unaffiliated workers to unload their own belongings and materials.[1] This happens with the tacit support of political parties including those in government. In Malayalam, 'nokku kooli', translates into 'gawking wages' or 'wages for (just) looking on'.[2]
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Bullshit jobs are not specific to state capitalist ("socialist") economies - they are a constant of all capitalist systems, as common in big corporations in the USA as they are in China or they were in the USSR. They do tend to take different shapes, but they are a natural effect of corruption, which tends to affect all large organizations.
  - cscurmudgeon 4y ago
    > Bullshit jobs are not specific to state capitalist Yes, but unlike in socialist governments, companies with a lot of bullshit jobs will die due to being inefficient. Thats the point of capitalism. Nobody has to work to support other able bodied humans rent seeking off their labor and capital. But in the US this is not true, as we don't have true capitalism in the US, we have a socialist mix and the govt can sometimes prop up inefficient companies. But in socialism, authoritarians will remain in power for decades even if the majority doesn't like it. Rent seeking is a natural state of affairs in more socialist countries.
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csomar 4y ago
I think you contribute with real dollars (in Europe case, it's Euros). Whether these euros are derived from a real activity (ie: garbage collection) or a fake activity (ie: finance and eh, politics) or a negative activity (ie: a tobacco company). It's irrelevant.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
The rest of the economy to sell you junk you don't need to keep them employed?

gymbeaux 4y ago

But at the same time I don’t want to be forced into paying say $1M into social security and only live to see $200k come back to me

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 4y ago
Realistically that's what needs to happen. Wealth needs to be redistributed from the old rich to the old poor. Social Security is meant to be security for the old poor, not a middle class pension.
- deleted 4y ago
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supernova87a 4y ago
I thought the idea of Social Security was an insurance program to guard against you outliving your means if you live long enough, not an I-get-paid-back cash-out of your payments. Aren't you having a fundamental misunderstanding about what the purpose of SS is? And not sure if you know, but the dollar figures are more like: Max pay into the program: ~$300k over your 40 year working life (if you maxed out the contribution cap, 6% tax on $167k currently) Max payout from the program: ~$600k (if you draw the maximum when you retire and luckily live a long time, ~20 years) Not "paying in $1m, and only getting $200k", by a long shot. I think it's quite in the opposite direction of how you think you're being taken for a ride.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  > I thought the idea of Social Security was an insurance program to guard against you outliving your means if you live long enough, not an I-get-paid-back cash-out of your payments. Is that a fundamental misunderstanding about what the purpose of SS is? Yes, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of social security. Social security isn't insurance or an investment, it's a tax that's presented as an insurance or investment in order to make it more palatable. The social security tax rates were set with the demographics and life expectancies in mind decades ago. And now that these demographics and life expectancies have changed we'll either have to drastically increase the tax workers are paying, or drastically cut the amount that people withdraw.

CamperBob2 4y ago

As populations age into a higher percentage of retirees, the system is forced to cope with a more people who are purely consumers, but contribute nothing to the system. Also interesting that the inflationary effect of this phenomenon is starting to be recognized. A large fraction of the population has nothing to do but sit around spending money. I'd never considered this point before now, but hopefully the Fed takes it into account when they decide how much to hose the rest of us with high interest rates (which the Boomers also DGAF about.)

ajmurmann 4y ago
The problem isn't that retirees spent too much money. Most money gets spent by people in middle age who have kids, active income and no choice but spend the money. Retirees typically try to be prudent. This is why you see the large export numbers with comparatively low imports in countries with low birth rates in parts of Asia and Europe. Very productive people with no kids spending little of their money and soon stopping to contribute and cut down on spending to brace for the long haul. (source: numerous Peter Zeihan interviews and videos) Still will lead to inflation though, as you point out, since production will drop. I also wonder what that means for index funds and the stock market in general. Every month massive amounts of retirement savings get directed there because there is really no other place to invest. What is gonna happen when contributions turn into withdrawals?

game_the0ry 4y ago

> As populations age into a higher percentage of retirees, the system is forced to cope with a more people who are purely consumers, but contribute nothing to the system. Sort of off topic, but I do agree that the older generations in the western world, particularly the american baby boomers, act sociopathic as a group. There is a good book about this: A generation of sociopaths. [1] Sad to watch an entire generation hate their children and grandchildren (if they even have them). Believe me, I do not enjoy painting an entire group of people with a shit-stained brush, but it is what it is and it should be called out. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Generation-Sociopaths-Boomers-Betrayed-America/dp/0316395781 https://www.amazon.com/Generation-Sociopaths-Boomers-Betraye...

nonethewiser 4y ago
If we’re playing that game, then this diagnosis is coming from a group with severe anxiety.
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  This being any sort of ‘tit-for-tat’ response is coincidentally a pretty ‘boomer’ take on mental health. Anxiety can be (and is often) situational, and anxious situations can be a catalyst for general anxiety disorder, etc. I’m not gonna sit here and pretend to know what it’s like to be an average income earning millennial, even though I am a millennial. But the fact that I’m sitting here on my nice fat tech worker salary (after still finding it quite hard to buy a house), supporting my partner who is studying and working part-time, and am still feeling the pinch of inflation, makes me completely sympathise with those earning less than me that are surely freaking the fuck out.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    What about observing a trend is a boomer take?
- justinclift 4y ago
  > ... from a group with severe anxiety. Maybe they have a good reason for it, which is the point? :p

nonethewiser 4y ago

Stop Social Security. It’s literally a ponzi scheme that’s justified by the fallacious reasoning of “well I paid into it.”

spywaregorilla 4y ago

That's just because people died young. The mode (most common) age of death was over 75 in France for men in 1930. I'm not sure how WWII factors into that. It's now about 82, eyeballing it (yes, still higher). https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPU_1204_0683--the-most-frequent-adult-length-of-life-i.htm https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPU_1204_0683--the-mos... People were not "old" and dying at appreciably higher rates given they reached age 60 back then. The general premise that there's a lot of rich old people now is true. But the factors that have raised life expectancy are probably working against this trend, and to minor effect, as they primarily raise the current number of kids.

gleenn 4y ago
My understanding was that almost all countries with advanced economies are experiencing negative growth in producing children. So even if you are right about the nuance in age, go look at Japan. Their population is shrinking.
- notch898a 4y ago
  Purely economically, only a total moron would have a child. Child labor has been outlawed and society says the (grown) child is their cash cow not yours, so the retirement from taxing the kid is spread across everyone else. Meanwhile you're asked to pay the lions share of the investment for everybody else to cash out on. So the name of the game is to let everybody else have the kids and free-ride the fuck out of that by paying some token contribution like the property tax for their grade school or whatever and then taking advantage of their tax dollars when you get older. This is a huge departure from almost all of human history except the last 100 years in the developed world, where the family formerly was the safety net so these kind of investments and arrangements stayed in the family leaving a much stronger economic incentive for children.
  - tnel77 4y ago
    As a parent, you are 100% correct. I love my kids and I’m saving like mad for them, but the future is, frankly, bleak for young people.

tomcam 4y ago

> Giving old people money for free Didn’t they pay into Social Security?

Uvix 4y ago
No - Social Security for the people who are already retired is paid for by the people who are currently working. Nobody is "paying into" anything.
- kasey_junk 4y ago
  Not sure why you are getting downvoted. At least in the US Social Security is a benefits program like Medicare, Medicaid, Snap, etc. It has special accounting rules for Congress but that’s about the only difference. It’s not a forced retirement savings scheme where you “pay into” it. At anytime Congress can change what the benefits are and the only reason it hadn’t happened yet is because it’s such a popular welfare program.
- tomcam 4y ago
  I am trying to understand this. What were the mini tens of thousands of dollars I paid to the federal government over a period of 40 years in the form of Social Security taxes then?
  - jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 4y ago
    It's a tax. That money is spent and gone. You no longer have any claim on it. If you live long enough, you may get to claim tax money paid by other workers, but that has nothing to do with what you were taxed.
  - jandrewrogers 4y ago
    Social Security taxes are just ordinary income taxes, no different than the rest of the income taxes you may have paid. It does not entitle you to anything. This was settled by the US Supreme Court in 1960.
  - ryeights 4y ago

_8j50 4y ago

First of all, you don't freaking need your own new house to start a family. In most countries most people never buy a new house. Second, wealth is not zero-sum, there isn't a magic pot of gold redistributed between people. As value and demand are added to the economy, so is wealth because the new young people with demands can provide skills or time to be used in value creation and then they also (and older folks that are not creating value because they are not working) can consume and create demand which defines the amount of wealth they create. Poor old people are a net negative but rich old people create demand and thus wealth for value creating youth, unless of course they have everything they need and live in the woods or something. But even poor old people need to eat and have health care demands that young people provide. The forest you are missing for the trees here is the greed of corporations who are not increasing wages to keep up with not just inflation but the value young people are creating. Things like labor unions are a joke in the US and politicians need corporations like fish need water. So the profit margins of companies and the wealth of shareholders is increasing as a result of the young people who are creating that wealth and giving it away to them because they can't collectively bargain and say they want fair pay. as individuals they can be replaced easily if they don't like the compensation. So this whole old people vs young people and millenials destroying things and boomers hoarding wealth and all that is bullshit. The education in the US is shit, you can't compete in a global economy and keep up with wealth creation as a result (still at the top but getting closer to stagnation). And the US is essentially and oligarchy at this point. The richest country in the world and it is the rich share holding class that only care about amassing enough wealth that their descendants will make it through whatever shit the country goes through, so they don't care how much americans suffer or get robbed in day light. This comes down to democracy being a game of information. Whoever controls information controls democracy and this means two things, education and media. You have so many idiots even young ones fall for the trump bullshit because of education and media/social media bubbles and it isn't an accident that education is shit either, it isn't an accident that racism and xenophobia and other hateful things are the tools the ruling class uses to manange democracy. America embraced greed as a way of life and the greedy rule and we are finding out why greed is evil in all forms as If we are part of a fable people will tell their children ages from now to teach them to avoid greed and pride. But not all hope is lost, information and disinformation are education and self education are still popular thanks to the internet. Americans need to pursue truth and justice and fight evil because nothing built on lies and evil lasts. Democracy can still work, but if the voters embrace greed, the the result is what you see. Ask most americans what they think of basic welfare and they'll tell you it's just black people being lazy and taking from the government (in reality it is mostly not black people but why does race matter at all?). We all know greed and hated are wrong, we can't blame corporations and politicians when we choose hatred and greed, these things must be adressed before you can change the way things are done and have fair wages and a stable democracy and solve so many other major issues in the US. Forgive the long post, let me know if you disagree.

eweise 4y ago

If you're referring to social security, that money is not free at all. People pay into the system for 40-50 years so they can get a fraction of it back in retirement. Regarding college inflation, that's purely caused by young people taking out loans. Don't do that. My kid is taking a good number of his classes at the community college. If y'all started shopping for the cheapest way to get an education, costs would come down.

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ericmay 4y ago
If that happened en masse then the universities you ultimately want to attend will start requiring their courses and not accepting transfer credits or something else. Not saying it’s a bad idea or anything to take classes and then transfer them in.

jtr1 4y ago

1. At least in the US, contributions to social security stop once you hit 160k, making it a regressive tax. Raise that cap and like magic, the system is solvent. 2. Growing home prices come from a lack of supply. And you’ve completely flattened an entire generation into one wealth class, which is a gross distortion of the facts.

throwaway2037 4y ago
Wow, I'm old. In my brain, it used to be about 80K. That was a long time ago! Here is the official history: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/cbb.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/cbb.html The jump between 2022 and 2023 is huge.
- simoncion 4y ago
  > The jump between 2022 and 2023 is huge. It's not that far off from actual inflation during that period (and inflation that is currently ongoing).
mynameishere 4y ago
That doesn't make it "regressive". The untaxed dollars after 160k don't count towards benefits. Rather, the tax is extremely progressive due to the various "bends". As you contribute more into the system, they make the per-dollar value of your contributions go from .9 to .3 to .15. Anyway, Social Security is fine. It's Medicare/Medicaid that's going to nuke the budget.
- YokoZar 4y ago
  The payroll tax is an income tax with the following brackets: 0-147k: 12.4% 147k+: 0% The number goes down at the higher income bracket, which means you pay less % of your money in payroll taxes the more you make. That is the very definition of regressive.
  - jandrewrogers 4y ago
    Those aren’t the only tax brackets high earners are subject to. Aggregate tax load is roughly still progressive. That aside, as a matter of policy, uncapping the taxes would destroy the popular notion that the amount of Social Security you receive reflects your contributions. If the public believed it was literally just income tax, and if there was no cap there would be no reason to not just adjust the income tax by that amount, it would be subject to the same politics as income taxes and could be cut on a whim. Treating it differently than income taxes, even when it is not, is essential for its survival. If they didn’t cap it, top income tax rates would be >60%, and there isn’t much appetite for that.

jmyeet 4y ago

So a lot of people will label you a conservative because that is a conservative take but I've come to understand that you're simply American and your views are normative for an American. American normative positions are inherently right-wing. Corporate profits in the US amount to about $10T/year [1]. You can and should view this as an estimate of the surplus value of labor that is being extracted. This amounts to $36,000 for every adult (~275M) in the US per year. We could absolutely afford an unimaginable increase of standard of living for retirees and workers. We simply choose not to. [1]: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/corporate-profits https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/corporate-profits

makeitdouble 4y ago

> Giving old people money for free when their 10x more valuable houses inflate the market Aside from that money not being "free", the important part of your observation is on the housing price and how the market works I think. These are IMO way more important issues than wether elderlies should work until 65 or 95.

zouhair 4y ago

> contribute nothing to the system. Maybe the system needs to adapt to humans not the other way around. Why human worth is only linked of how much money they make? It's dystopian.

dangwhy 4y ago

> . Today in the US it's 77.8. In France, it's 82. Its 73.5 for males. you only have 8 years after retirement :/ https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/life-expectancy.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/life-expectancy.htm

z2 4y ago
Actually, with conditional probability, if you can make it to 65 as a male, you're expected to get 18 more years. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

pdntspa 4y ago

> and contribute nothing to the system I'm sorry but I've contributed a fuckload of money to this system and I better be getting the value I paid for out of it when it comes to that time. These people are not 'consumers'

throwaway1777 4y ago
Doesn’t matter how mad you are about it. You likely won’t get out what you put in.

hungryforcodes 4y ago

But what will you say when you are 60 or 65? These people are not contributing during retirement, but HAVE contributed in the past. In fact people pay (especially in places like France) into a government retirement fund. And this happens over 20-40 years of work. This is a long time and if properly managed, should be fine. So people aren't just being given "free money", this is something that they have paid for and so they are protesting, because it's basically a kind of service that they have been promised in exchange for being taxed each pay check. But I still come back to the question of what you will do at retirement?

SoftTalker 4y ago
But it wasn’t properly managed. It was spent immediately, with IOUs written to replace it. There is no retirement “fund” in the way that word implies.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  That is the government's problem, not the workers'.
  - hungryforcodes 4y ago
    Hence the legit protests.
  - jbn 4y ago
    > There is no retirement “fund” in the way that word implies well, France really has 2 systems (to simplify, it's really more like 42+), the "public" one (i.e. civil servants) and the "private" one (i.e. anyone employed by an employer other than the state). The "public" retirement is based on the assumption that the state guarantees its liability for future pensions but doesn't actually put it on the books (if it did real debt would be another 2,000 billions euros), while the "private" retirement does have a "fund" (really several of them, one per sector of the economy) but it's revolving money put in by the current workforce but paying immediately current pensioners. This second system can in theory have excess money (but every time it does, a law is passed to extract some more money out of it to the benefit of the first!). Part of the issue in France is the existence of these 2 systems and the very fact that the state allows itself to do its accounting differently (in a way that unlawful for anybody else). If at least the state played by the same rules... (of course then it would have to recognize this extra debt of 2,000 billions euros, and that would disqualify the country from the eurozone!). But in short, yes it is very much the government's problem. They (since 1945) have "organized" pensions in a way that makes them a time bomb both in its accounting, and in its unjust rules (rules vary a lot per sector of the economy).

m463 4y ago

> "Giving old people money for free " uh, didn't the old people finance their own social security? Didn't they give up money their whole lives to finance their homes? Don't they contribute to society in other less-measurable ways? That said, there could be some ways to retire, but be able to work in such a way that retirement is not adversely affected. Some of my friends who retired had to carefully not work or social security was adversely affected.

astrange 4y ago
> uh, didn't the old people finance their own social security? No, that's the original marketing but the payments you get out of it aren't related to the ones you put into it i.e. they're just a tax to fund the program.
- skrause 4y ago
  Really depends on the country. In Germany the payments you get out of it are related to the ones you put into it and are separate from the taxes.
  - manuelmoreale 4y ago
    Same in Italy but it’s related to how much you paid, it’s not the same money. The money I’m currently paying are used to finance pensions to people retired now. When I’ll retire (will never happen at this rate) I’ll get a pension that’s based on how much I contributed but the money will come from people who will still be working.
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majormajor 4y ago
> In the original Act benefits were to be paid only to the primary worker when he/she retired at age 65. Benefits were to be based on payroll tax contributions that the worker made during his/her working life. Taxes would first be collected in 1937 and monthly benefits would begin in 1942. (Under amendments passed in 1939, payments were advanced to 1940.) That's from https://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html https://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html - so generally, the old were financed by the younger at inception, and that's basically continued ever since. Nobody funded their own SSN fully between 1937 and 1940. That sort of insurance is still a good idea. The "house" part of the person you're replying to's post is interesting: "Giving old people money for free when their 10x more valuable houses inflate the market" By definition, anyone whose house is 10x more valuable than it was when they bought it is not inflating the market. The people buying at the new price are the ones driving the current valuation of that house. But constrained supply does also come into play; and other forms of social assistance are conditional on income levels and such; it wouldn't be totally unreasonable or unprecedented to make some benefits conditional on assets in cases like that - if you're sitting on a 900k asset, maybe leverage that first if you don't otherwise have any savings? And in doing so, open up that spot for a younger generation that still has to commute, etc?

partiallypro 4y ago

It's less about wealth of the oldest generation and more about the fact that we don't have a good replacement rate from reproduction or immigration. Birth rates around the world are not even at replacement rates. The entire retirement system is built on the idea that younger workers will chip in to pay for the elderly, but...we can't do that at scale, because there won't be enough people. There are still a lot of older poor people now, and caring for them and end of life care is incredibly expensive. Even "rich" people now will be poor by the time they die, especially in the US. A huge portion of US inheritance will evaporate paying for parents aging.

csomar 4y ago

So it's everyone's fault but... I don't get it. The system is a ponzi scheme. It was bound to have issues while benefiting the early players. Why not admit that?

rahen 4y ago
Because once you're invested in a Ponzi, you lose it all when it crumbles. It will, ineluctably, but if you can push the date further, then maybe you can get away with it. To postpone its fate, they'll advocate for a harsher taxation of their neighbor and the business next door so they can profit from them the most ("I know they have money, while I'm so poor you know..."). They also need newcomers in the pyramid, so they advocate for more recruits. Then they will call that "solidarity" so they don't have to face their short-term, greedy mindset, the same they blame others for.

grog454 4y ago

> with the oldest generations owning the vast majority of wealth and real estate, and with college, housing, and many costs of living having inflated 3-20x since the older generations were younger, it is a problem. This is one "benefit" of inflation. Whatever you did 50 years ago in exchange for your wealth isn't worth as much to society today as it was back then, in general. So you can continue to do something productive or hope you were productive enough before you retired that your compensation lasts.

jmoak3 4y ago

This is summed up nicely. To add, simply take a look at the % of USA federal spending that goes to Medicare and Social Security, which are benefits for the over 65 population. It's 1/3rd. 1/3rd of Americans are also over the age of 55, which will push that number higher. We are consuming our young. As a 29 year old, unless technology advances radically and I have positions in the companies controlling it, I will not get what I put in. There are many advanced economies in worse positions. France for example spends ~15% of it's total GDP on pensions alone. We can all blame whatever severely rich people exist, however the death by a thousand cuts brought on by too few supporting too many is the root of the issue. The worst part is, many of these supported elderly aren't even able to live decent lives.

hedora 4y ago
Social Security isn’t federal spending. People pay into the trust fund, then withdraw when they retire. It is set up so that it cannot run a deficit. However, congress raided the social security fund, spent the money, and now they are deflecting blame away from themselves by claiming the system was insolvent by design.
- junofan 4y ago
  It’s federal spending. The Social Security Administration’s website clarifies that misconception [1]. [1]: https://www.ssa.gov/budget/?tab=0 https://www.ssa.gov/budget/?tab=0

xvilka 4y ago

The good example of the extreme skew is Japan, when government optimizes their policies in favor of old people at the expense of young people who can't even influence the policy enough.

crawfordcomeaux 4y ago

> and contribute nothing to the system This is an ageist perspective and foundational to what you've written. Older people have a lot to contribute and it's unmeasured. The same goes for partners who stay at home with young people instead of working. They're DEEPLY contributing without pay. You're going after old people in a faux-scarcity world. How about you take on the collective issues, like capitalism choosing to gatekeep resources behind labor?

yunohn 4y ago
Their perspective also ignores the fact that previous generations built the world that current and future generations continue to develop. We all stand on the shoulders of giants…

dv_dt 4y ago

We are living in an artificial scarcity world is more of a problem than us not having enough capacity to sustain retirement and increase leisure time of the pre-retirement demographics. Technologically, imho we have been beyond a post scarcity level for quite a while - its our economic system and its poor allocation of wealth and resource allocation that is antiquated, irrational, and constraining the system. Austerity is just giving up at actually building the system in the ways needed for more people to retire or even live out their lives avoiding things like climate change.

1letterunixname 4y ago
Austerity is the neoliberal elites like Macron way of feigning poverty. They want a small, weak government, powerful businesses, and an impoverished society completely dependent on their whims and generosity.
- rahen 4y ago
  Any government wants power, money, and having society depend on them. The bigger and more powerful the government, the more they can do. Same with companies: the larger the more annoying, but at least you can choose them, and there's competition. Not so much with governments, they just act like a powerful monopolistic megacorp. The goal is to make power decentralized, not further concentrated in a few hands, especially not a government that can get away with it as much as they want, and even use violence, contempt and oppression if needed.
  - dv_dt 4y ago
    I am skeptical that blanket decentralization works without some central framework to maintain it. Otherwise power still accumulates and without some enforcement of openness and a collective discussion - corruption also grows perfectly fine without government involved. See decentralized crypto industry as a microcosm. I would say that government and a healthy protest of government as the French are exercising is one way to check the over accumulation of oppressive power.

Reptur 4y ago

Those who set it know that people in lower socioeconomic status won't live until 77.8. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170131190102.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170131190102.h...

p4bl0 4y ago

Your message is wrong on so many levels I don't really know how to start. First, average life expectancy is absolutely not an interesting measure. You should at least look at the average age up to which people are alive and in good health. And this is much lower. Also, life expectancy is very different depending on your social class. Construction workers die much younger than software engineers. And this is even more true regarding life expectancy in good health. By increasing the age at which one can retire, what you actually do is to make the poorer contribute to retirement money they won't be able to benefit of because they'll be dead before or soon after while the rich will enjoy their retirement since they live longer in good health. Concerning the whole there is more old people thing: yes, there is, but at the same time workers have never been as productive as they're now. And France as never been as rich as it is now. There is no technical problem here, just a political choice. The Cor (Conseil d'orientation des retraites, which is the official institution that studies retirement in France with projections into the future etc) says our retirement system is currently stable with no real risk to its equilibrium (actually there is one scenario over four in which it may temporarily have a deficit in a few years but that resorbs itself over a few years as well — and you have to know that a few years back they made projections and were quite pessimistic for the situation today, but the reality is that nowadays our retirement system is afloat and well, with multiple billions in positive this year for example). Also, there are solutions if we need more contribution to retirement fund: one of which is to increase wages, another one of which is to pay women the same as men (in France the gap is still between 15% and 20%), another one is to tax the richest more, or simply to politically accept to keep the portion of GDP we spend on the elderly the same rather than wanting to keep the absolute amount the same or lower (which is what Macron wants). Finally, retirement pension is not "giving people money for free". Retired people are not "just consumers", they contribute a lot to society, even if from a capitalist point of view it is not directly visible: more than a third of the volunteering in (quite sadly, indispensable) non-profit is done by young retirees who can still do it, almost half of baby-sitting is done by grand-parents who can do it because they're retired, etc. What kills the livelyhoods of younger generation is small wages, no political control over rent prices, a partly artificial inflation which main effect is to make everyone pay more at the supermarket to enrich shareholders who bet on the inflation even more, and soon, if this law passes, it will be the burden of having to take care of their parents who could not work til the increased retirement minimum age for health reasons and will therefore have way too small pensions to be independent.