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I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s

I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money, which in this case is the boomers votes with the younger generations money. This will continue until nothing is left. This already happened with the triple pension lock in GB, mathematically ensuring the bankruptcy of the state.

lenerdenator 6mo ago
It's happening in the US, too. I know of a senior couple where the husband recently retired after forty years of working in a professional field. They live in a house worth over $750k that is paid off. They have three new or late-model vehicles. Both the husband and wife could, if necessary, work for an income. They also collect Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance checks after enrolling for them. The common name for this is Social Security. Why the hell are they able to collect on that? They have the ability to work and assets that could readily be made liquid to fund living expenses.
- nixon_why69 6mo ago
  SS has to pay everyone to be viable. If you make it more complicated the politics turn into a nightmare.
  - adrianN 6mo ago
    Social security is already a redistribution scheme, it already is more complicated.
- WalterBright 6mo ago
  > Why the hell are they able to collect on that? People in the higher income brackets get far less back on SS than they paid in.
  - catgary 6mo ago
    Yeah, because they aren’t in need of a social safety net.
  - Terr_ 6mo ago
    I think it's important to emphasize that much of the in/out money asymmetry in SS is not rich versus poor ... but old versus dead. Which, incidentally, is good and proper! OASDI is an insurance policy to cover an (alive) person faced with starvation or living in a ditch. That's a very different set of tradeoffs from an investment account that can pass to children who don't need it. Like all insurance, it depends on a portion of people who pay in and then don't need it, even if sometimes that's because they've, er, passed beyond all material needs.
  - lenerdenator 6mo ago
    They shouldn't get any. This is a fund for widows, orphans, and those who are simply unable to earn any sort of money to fund their survival. They're none of the above.
    - WalterBright 6mo ago
      SS was set up as an annuity, not a charity.
      - lenerdenator 6mo ago
        It was set up as neither. It's a taxpayer-funded insurance policy, where the risk is you being alive without a way to earn a living. We have effectively managed that risk for a very large portion of the people who are collecting on that insurance policy by switching over to a service economy where most jobs do not require the physical labor that an elderly person cannot safely do. Furthermore, they're also the portion of the population with the longest time to have accumulated assets. If you want to keep the insurance policy sustainable for the next generation - who is also paying into it - you need to treat it like an insurance policy. If you allow people to make any and all claims against the funds backing an insurance policy, the funds will eventually be depleted as there will be more people withdrawing from it than paying in. You also have to account for the opportunity cost of the people paying into that system not paying into something else, like our ballooning national debt, or the debts that many Americans of working age have to take on to maintain a decent standard of living.
- hilariously 6mo ago
  Because they were promised it - fundamentally leaving the rich out of the social safety net doesn't even get us much and administrating the distinction costs money, and I am no fan of the wealthiest get additional benefits. I think solving inequality will not be about reducing access to said safety nets but increasing them for all.
  - WalterBright 6mo ago
    The problem with "solving inequality" is there is no incentive for one to do better. If one can live as well as everyone else, with no effort, why should one make the effort?
    - Terr_ 6mo ago
      Kind of a strawman though, innit? If "civilization will stagnate and humans will be unmotivated blobs" is one extreme, then the other is something like "condoning economic genocide". In reality, few are concerned that Alice has a much nicer car than Bob, compared to concerns that Bob will die without insulin. Get Bob his insulin, and he will still be motivated to have a nicer car.
      - WalterBright 6mo ago
        > Kind of a strawman though, innit? Not at all. It's the primary reason why communes fail.
        nixon_why69 6mo ago
        I think there's likely a steel man version of "solving inequality" that's a little less radical than "establish a commune". Something like "arrest the trend towards upward accumulation which also reduces incentives to excel", maybe.
        WalterBright 6mo ago
        If we did that, we wouldn't have SpaceX, Nvidia, AI, etc.
- bruce511 6mo ago
  If you work for 40 years, chances are you will have accumulated some assets. I'm not sure that "sell your house and cars to pay for food" is a policy that will be popular. Equally those same people have paid taxes for 40 years, paid into social security (to the benefit of their elders) and so on. Keeping them in the work-force is largely undesirable. A job occupied by a 70 year old is a job not occupied by someone younger. If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around. (using imprecise simple math). Look, most all of us will get old and eventually claim on social security or whatever. Politically just "ending that" is pretty much a non-starter to anyone who has been contributing for any length of time. Even fiddling with the edges of it (raising the retirement age) will get you voted out of office.
  - WalterBright 6mo ago
    > Keeping them in the work-force is largely undesirable. That presumes there are a fixed number of jobs. Anyone can create a job, even doing simple things like going door to door and offering to mow the lawn.
    - recursive-call 6mo ago
      Sure, in theory. But if that was economically viable, why isn’t anyone doing it?
      - WalterBright 6mo ago
        People do it all the time. One man companies are commonplace. They come to my door now and then, selling magazine subscriptions, offering to clean my driveway, do yard work, tree trimming, exterminating, carry off junk, do estate sales for you, and so forth. I remember one guy who had a one man outfit that replaced broken garage door springs. It was all he did. He had a trunk full of springs. Any decent real estate agent has a rolodex of these people, who are hired to do what is necessary to prep a house for sale.
  - opo 6mo ago
    >... If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around. (using imprecise simple math). Economists refer to this idea as the lump of labour fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
- throw-234 6mo ago
  > They have three new or late-model vehicles. Depends on geography of course, but it's not rare at all for boomers to have this many houses as a normal part of how they experienced middle-class life. As a group they are not only more likely to have rental/investment property, but also more likely to have multiple such properties. Why would they sell? They can get you to pay for all their services, and vote as a block to deny and remove services elsewhere.
  - lenerdenator 6mo ago
    Because that cannot continue in perpetuity. The cracks are already starting to show. If I were in my 60s faced with the real possibility of living another 15-30 years I'd want the younger people to feel like they had something to look forward to. Many young and middle-aged people in the US don't feel that way. What they can't get through the ballot box, they'll get other ways, ways that will cause others to say "I'm not saying I agree, I'm saying I understand." It's the job of government to make sure that doesn't happen, not cater to it.
    - underlipton 6mo ago
      They're not thinking that far ahead. Their response to the first waves of discontent - Occupy Wall Street, Trayvon Martin Protests, Michael Brown Protests, Charlottesville, Freddie Gray Protests, George Floyd Protests, January 6th - was either to mock or chide the aggrieved, or to cast them as unprecedented threats to the nation's security (but then not actually do anything to address grievances or even punish transgressions). So much stuff has burned in the past 1.5 decades, there's still not a wealth-adjusted plurality of Boomers who want to fix anything. Their tacit rallying cry came from Biden: "Nothing fundamentally will change."
- toast0 6mo ago
  They paid for Old Age Insurance, and they reached old age, so they get to collect. Social Security as an insurance product is fiction, but playing into the fiction helps it survive to do the thing it was built for: keep the elderly out of the poor houses / off the street. Payout rates drop at higher income, and portions of the payout are taxable at higher income, so it's not like it's completely income/wealth blind.
  - lenerdenator 6mo ago
    > They paid for Old Age Insurance, and they reached old age, so they get to collect. That's just it: they're not old. Not in the way a 65-year-old was old in the 1930s. If they had to farm, mine, log, or work in a factory, yeah, they'd be too old to work. That was most of the work available when OASDI was created, and that's what it's for: to keep you from becoming destitute as an elderly person when there is no ability to work. But they don't have to do those things. We're a service economy now and most of that involves sitting at a desk or very light office labor. They can still do that to sustain their lifestyle. Failing that, they could liquidate assets. We're handing out money to people as a treat for their 65th b-day while the national debt is continuing to rise and their kids are crushed under loan debt, medical debt, and further revenue extraction to keep the shares backing retirement accounts increasing in value.
    - triceratops 6mo ago
      So why did we make them pay Social Security taxes for the entirety of their 40-year careers? They could've invested the money at a better return than Treasury bills and had way more liquid assets.
      - lenerdenator 6mo ago
        Why do you pay insurance for anything? So the funds are there if you need them. The goal is not to maximize return, it's to guarantee a check that keeps you from being destitute. That's it. That's the whole point. Not limitless growth, not a nice bit of sugar from Uncle Sam every month to supplement millions of dollars in assets. To keep you from being dying in the street as an elderly person. If we're going to call the current abuse of OASDI a legitimate use of insurance, then I want to be able to get my home protection policy company to help me out on a down payment for a house. I've paid in, after all. It's the least they can do.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  Go to bogleheads and read for awhile - you get an amazing view into the “rich” in various stages and it’s eye-opening in a number of ways. You find those who have saved so much they have no hope of spending it all and yet are still scared to spend. Those who spend months worrying if they can buy a new car to replace their 25 year old Camry and yet they live on social security alone while having mandatory IRA disbursements in the thousands. Social security et al should never have been sold as “savings for the future” and just been another tax.
opo 6mo ago
>...I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money, In the last few decades both political parties in the USA have tried to outdo each other in reckless over-spending, but for the first couple hundred years that wasn't the case. Something changed.
- croon 6mo ago
  There wasn't a speculative economy based on increasingly distant balance sheets. The stock market was initially created to crowdfund big investments. It's still that in theory, but in practice it's something very different now. In a similar manner to bastardizing the stock market, the national budget is run in any way that is short term beneficial and long term nebulous.
- MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago
  You can read this exact criticism of democracy in „Athenaion Politeia“, (The Old Oligarch), 5th century BCE. There is nothing new under the sun. It always worked like this. Democracy is simply an incredibly destructive form of government.
  - tsunamifury 6mo ago
    To ignore scale differences here is to negate what could have been a great comment into a miss.
    - MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago
      Scale is an important aspect. If something doesn’t work in a greek city state, it certainly won’t work in anything larger.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    Democracy hasn’t even been good at its sole point - preventing violent revolution.
Theodores 6mo ago
The B-word - boomer - is what it is about. The government has always been about them, well, at least since WW2, or WW Eleven as one of the few youthful members of Congress would have it. In the UK and elsewhere in Europe we had free education for the boomers, with benefits for them in the holidays. But they hoisted the ladder up after them. Final salary pensions, boomers had that, but they deprived others of getting the same perk. The same with healthcare and everything the state does, it was all designed for boomers. The boomers once had people waving CND and Peace signs in their midst, however, after 9/11 the boomers found themselves back in their happy space of having an external enemy, the semi-fictional 'al-qaeda' mercenaries that none of them ever met. Their younger selves would not have been clamouring for war, but, after the planes hit the towers, they were just gagging to support more and more bombing, all in their name. The boomers paid for the nukes, the planes to deliver them and the entire war machine, whilst pricing their kids out of the housing market whilst chastising their own kids with 'back in our day we had nothing and had to work harder than you with your latte and iphone'. We all know the deal. The problem is not just a few geriatrics in power, which societies have had problems with ever since the first king, it is bigger than that, it is the boomers that do not care about anything other than their selfish world view, that can't be argued with because you can't 'cheek your elders'. The problem with the boomers is that many of their children honestly believe they can mimic the boomer life, where you knuckle down and pay for that mortgage like they did and where you spew toxic emissions everywhere you go, because boomers are entirely car dependent.

lenerdenator 6mo ago

It's happening in the US, too. I know of a senior couple where the husband recently retired after forty years of working in a professional field. They live in a house worth over $750k that is paid off. They have three new or late-model vehicles. Both the husband and wife could, if necessary, work for an income. They also collect Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance checks after enrolling for them. The common name for this is Social Security. Why the hell are they able to collect on that? They have the ability to work and assets that could readily be made liquid to fund living expenses.

nixon_why69 6mo ago
SS has to pay everyone to be viable. If you make it more complicated the politics turn into a nightmare.
- adrianN 6mo ago
  Social security is already a redistribution scheme, it already is more complicated.
WalterBright 6mo ago
> Why the hell are they able to collect on that? People in the higher income brackets get far less back on SS than they paid in.
- catgary 6mo ago
  Yeah, because they aren’t in need of a social safety net.
- Terr_ 6mo ago
  I think it's important to emphasize that much of the in/out money asymmetry in SS is not rich versus poor ... but old versus dead. Which, incidentally, is good and proper! OASDI is an insurance policy to cover an (alive) person faced with starvation or living in a ditch. That's a very different set of tradeoffs from an investment account that can pass to children who don't need it. Like all insurance, it depends on a portion of people who pay in and then don't need it, even if sometimes that's because they've, er, passed beyond all material needs.
- lenerdenator 6mo ago
  They shouldn't get any. This is a fund for widows, orphans, and those who are simply unable to earn any sort of money to fund their survival. They're none of the above.
  - WalterBright 6mo ago
    SS was set up as an annuity, not a charity.
    - lenerdenator 6mo ago
      It was set up as neither. It's a taxpayer-funded insurance policy, where the risk is you being alive without a way to earn a living. We have effectively managed that risk for a very large portion of the people who are collecting on that insurance policy by switching over to a service economy where most jobs do not require the physical labor that an elderly person cannot safely do. Furthermore, they're also the portion of the population with the longest time to have accumulated assets. If you want to keep the insurance policy sustainable for the next generation - who is also paying into it - you need to treat it like an insurance policy. If you allow people to make any and all claims against the funds backing an insurance policy, the funds will eventually be depleted as there will be more people withdrawing from it than paying in. You also have to account for the opportunity cost of the people paying into that system not paying into something else, like our ballooning national debt, or the debts that many Americans of working age have to take on to maintain a decent standard of living.
hilariously 6mo ago
Because they were promised it - fundamentally leaving the rich out of the social safety net doesn't even get us much and administrating the distinction costs money, and I am no fan of the wealthiest get additional benefits. I think solving inequality will not be about reducing access to said safety nets but increasing them for all.
- WalterBright 6mo ago
  The problem with "solving inequality" is there is no incentive for one to do better. If one can live as well as everyone else, with no effort, why should one make the effort?
  - Terr_ 6mo ago
    Kind of a strawman though, innit? If "civilization will stagnate and humans will be unmotivated blobs" is one extreme, then the other is something like "condoning economic genocide". In reality, few are concerned that Alice has a much nicer car than Bob, compared to concerns that Bob will die without insulin. Get Bob his insulin, and he will still be motivated to have a nicer car.
    - WalterBright 6mo ago
      > Kind of a strawman though, innit? Not at all. It's the primary reason why communes fail.
      - nixon_why69 6mo ago
        I think there's likely a steel man version of "solving inequality" that's a little less radical than "establish a commune". Something like "arrest the trend towards upward accumulation which also reduces incentives to excel", maybe.
        WalterBright 6mo ago
        If we did that, we wouldn't have SpaceX, Nvidia, AI, etc.
bruce511 6mo ago
If you work for 40 years, chances are you will have accumulated some assets. I'm not sure that "sell your house and cars to pay for food" is a policy that will be popular. Equally those same people have paid taxes for 40 years, paid into social security (to the benefit of their elders) and so on. Keeping them in the work-force is largely undesirable. A job occupied by a 70 year old is a job not occupied by someone younger. If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around. (using imprecise simple math). Look, most all of us will get old and eventually claim on social security or whatever. Politically just "ending that" is pretty much a non-starter to anyone who has been contributing for any length of time. Even fiddling with the edges of it (raising the retirement age) will get you voted out of office.
- WalterBright 6mo ago
  > Keeping them in the work-force is largely undesirable. That presumes there are a fixed number of jobs. Anyone can create a job, even doing simple things like going door to door and offering to mow the lawn.
  - recursive-call 6mo ago
    Sure, in theory. But if that was economically viable, why isn’t anyone doing it?
    - WalterBright 6mo ago
      People do it all the time. One man companies are commonplace. They come to my door now and then, selling magazine subscriptions, offering to clean my driveway, do yard work, tree trimming, exterminating, carry off junk, do estate sales for you, and so forth. I remember one guy who had a one man outfit that replaced broken garage door springs. It was all he did. He had a trunk full of springs. Any decent real estate agent has a rolodex of these people, who are hired to do what is necessary to prep a house for sale.
- opo 6mo ago
  >... If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around. (using imprecise simple math). Economists refer to this idea as the lump of labour fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
throw-234 6mo ago
> They have three new or late-model vehicles. Depends on geography of course, but it's not rare at all for boomers to have this many houses as a normal part of how they experienced middle-class life. As a group they are not only more likely to have rental/investment property, but also more likely to have multiple such properties. Why would they sell? They can get you to pay for all their services, and vote as a block to deny and remove services elsewhere.
- lenerdenator 6mo ago
  Because that cannot continue in perpetuity. The cracks are already starting to show. If I were in my 60s faced with the real possibility of living another 15-30 years I'd want the younger people to feel like they had something to look forward to. Many young and middle-aged people in the US don't feel that way. What they can't get through the ballot box, they'll get other ways, ways that will cause others to say "I'm not saying I agree, I'm saying I understand." It's the job of government to make sure that doesn't happen, not cater to it.
  - underlipton 6mo ago
    They're not thinking that far ahead. Their response to the first waves of discontent - Occupy Wall Street, Trayvon Martin Protests, Michael Brown Protests, Charlottesville, Freddie Gray Protests, George Floyd Protests, January 6th - was either to mock or chide the aggrieved, or to cast them as unprecedented threats to the nation's security (but then not actually do anything to address grievances or even punish transgressions). So much stuff has burned in the past 1.5 decades, there's still not a wealth-adjusted plurality of Boomers who want to fix anything. Their tacit rallying cry came from Biden: "Nothing fundamentally will change."
toast0 6mo ago
They paid for Old Age Insurance, and they reached old age, so they get to collect. Social Security as an insurance product is fiction, but playing into the fiction helps it survive to do the thing it was built for: keep the elderly out of the poor houses / off the street. Payout rates drop at higher income, and portions of the payout are taxable at higher income, so it's not like it's completely income/wealth blind.
- lenerdenator 6mo ago
  > They paid for Old Age Insurance, and they reached old age, so they get to collect. That's just it: they're not old. Not in the way a 65-year-old was old in the 1930s. If they had to farm, mine, log, or work in a factory, yeah, they'd be too old to work. That was most of the work available when OASDI was created, and that's what it's for: to keep you from becoming destitute as an elderly person when there is no ability to work. But they don't have to do those things. We're a service economy now and most of that involves sitting at a desk or very light office labor. They can still do that to sustain their lifestyle. Failing that, they could liquidate assets. We're handing out money to people as a treat for their 65th b-day while the national debt is continuing to rise and their kids are crushed under loan debt, medical debt, and further revenue extraction to keep the shares backing retirement accounts increasing in value.
  - triceratops 6mo ago
    So why did we make them pay Social Security taxes for the entirety of their 40-year careers? They could've invested the money at a better return than Treasury bills and had way more liquid assets.
    - lenerdenator 6mo ago
      Why do you pay insurance for anything? So the funds are there if you need them. The goal is not to maximize return, it's to guarantee a check that keeps you from being destitute. That's it. That's the whole point. Not limitless growth, not a nice bit of sugar from Uncle Sam every month to supplement millions of dollars in assets. To keep you from being dying in the street as an elderly person. If we're going to call the current abuse of OASDI a legitimate use of insurance, then I want to be able to get my home protection policy company to help me out on a down payment for a house. I've paid in, after all. It's the least they can do.
bombcar 6mo ago
Go to bogleheads and read for awhile - you get an amazing view into the “rich” in various stages and it’s eye-opening in a number of ways. You find those who have saved so much they have no hope of spending it all and yet are still scared to spend. Those who spend months worrying if they can buy a new car to replace their 25 year old Camry and yet they live on social security alone while having mandatory IRA disbursements in the thousands. Social security et al should never have been sold as “savings for the future” and just been another tax.

opo 6mo ago

>...I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money, In the last few decades both political parties in the USA have tried to outdo each other in reckless over-spending, but for the first couple hundred years that wasn't the case. Something changed.

croon 6mo ago
There wasn't a speculative economy based on increasingly distant balance sheets. The stock market was initially created to crowdfund big investments. It's still that in theory, but in practice it's something very different now. In a similar manner to bastardizing the stock market, the national budget is run in any way that is short term beneficial and long term nebulous.
MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago
You can read this exact criticism of democracy in „Athenaion Politeia“, (The Old Oligarch), 5th century BCE. There is nothing new under the sun. It always worked like this. Democracy is simply an incredibly destructive form of government.
- tsunamifury 6mo ago
  To ignore scale differences here is to negate what could have been a great comment into a miss.
  - MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago
    Scale is an important aspect. If something doesn’t work in a greek city state, it certainly won’t work in anything larger.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  Democracy hasn’t even been good at its sole point - preventing violent revolution.

Theodores 6mo ago

The B-word - boomer - is what it is about. The government has always been about them, well, at least since WW2, or WW Eleven as one of the few youthful members of Congress would have it. In the UK and elsewhere in Europe we had free education for the boomers, with benefits for them in the holidays. But they hoisted the ladder up after them. Final salary pensions, boomers had that, but they deprived others of getting the same perk. The same with healthcare and everything the state does, it was all designed for boomers. The boomers once had people waving CND and Peace signs in their midst, however, after 9/11 the boomers found themselves back in their happy space of having an external enemy, the semi-fictional 'al-qaeda' mercenaries that none of them ever met. Their younger selves would not have been clamouring for war, but, after the planes hit the towers, they were just gagging to support more and more bombing, all in their name. The boomers paid for the nukes, the planes to deliver them and the entire war machine, whilst pricing their kids out of the housing market whilst chastising their own kids with 'back in our day we had nothing and had to work harder than you with your latte and iphone'. We all know the deal. The problem is not just a few geriatrics in power, which societies have had problems with ever since the first king, it is bigger than that, it is the boomers that do not care about anything other than their selfish world view, that can't be argued with because you can't 'cheek your elders'. The problem with the boomers is that many of their children honestly believe they can mimic the boomer life, where you knuckle down and pay for that mortgage like they did and where you spew toxic emissions everywhere you go, because boomers are entirely car dependent.