4 ms·

As others have said, this is inevitable. However, maybe the young men will appreciate it when they become old men.

eavc 13y ago
Or when their parents become ill. Or for purposes of society.
hga 13y ago
Or maybe these young men realize that the Federal government's unfunded liabilities exceeding 90 trillion dollars, prior to adding Obamacare, will not be redeemed, because they simply cannot be? Seriously, I don't know your age, but are you at all confident that Social Security and Medicare will be there for you all the way to when you might die of natural causes? I seem to remember that surveys say the "young" don't believe it; if they're young enough, they don't expect to see anything coming from their FICA taxes.
- DougWebb 13y ago
  I'm about to turn 43, and I don't expect to see anything coming from my FICA taxes. I know that my FICA taxes are funding today's retirees, and not being held for me until I retire, and that unless the working population starts growing significantly larger soon, there won't be enough workers paying into the system when I'm ready to retire. What I expect is going to happen is that the retirement age will keep climbing, and I'll be chasing it up until I die. I also expect that income/wealth-based limits will be imposed which will cap whatever I can get well below the amount I'll need to come anywhere close to replacing what I can earn by continuing to work. I'm disappointed by this, but I accept that it's necessary to keep the system running for the people who need it more than I expect to, and I'm grateful that as a software engineer I'm likely to be able to earn a good income doing work that I enjoy for as long as I want to.
  - hga 13y ago
    "I know that my FICA taxes are funding today's retirees, and not being held for me until I retire...." And this is not even completely true. From 1983 to 2009 the surplus in FICA taxes compared to expenses was just spent (there are filing cabinets with unmarketable IOUs from the government, what Al Gore's "lockbox" was all about); only in 2010 did the main Social Security fund start running a real deficit requiring money from the general fund. I wonder about the retirement age climbing concept. Among other things, it's an even heavier burden on the young, e.g. your not retiring means 1 or 2 of them won't get a job in the first place. How long will they support a system that squeezes them so much? (There's lots more than this, of course, like non-recourse student loans.) What makes people your age think you'll be able to keep your jobs? I said "1 or 2" since its quite common to replace more expensive older workers with a couple of young ones. Way too many programmers my age, a decade older, are finding it nearly impossible to stay employed in the field (another reason we don't care for the H-1B, L-1 etc. visa programs); I sincerely hope your optimism "that as a software engineer I'm likely to be able to earn a good income doing work that I enjoy for as long as I want to." is well founded. I found it more and more difficult to find work starting sometime after age 35 until I got a clue and hid my age (easy since fortunate genetics makes me look decades younger than I am ... well, until I slip up and e.g. mention PDP-11s, which once got an "How old are you?!?!!" exclamation in an interview :-).
    - DougWebb 13y ago
      "What makes people your age think you'll be able to keep your jobs?" Blind optimism? I don't really have alternatives. I do think there will be a potential for self-employment as a consultant, using my years of experience (constantly kept up to date) to keep me more productive than a team a younger programmers. I'm also hoping that the biases against older programmers will fade away as I, and the overall population of software developers, gets older. There are always alternate career paths too. My skills and experience cover the entire breadth and depth of developing software products, so I have a pretty wide range of jobs I can handle. That should help me stay employable too.
      - hga 13y ago
        If you have any talent or desire, you might want to add a bit of sysadmin work, especially setting up systems (in my case, I start with building them from "scratch", but I like that sort of thing). I.e. broaden your problem solving scope. In small companies I also generally took over the duty of doing backups, it's something I like to do and its importance cannot be overstated. If you have the aptitude for consulting (I'm too much of an introvert to do that), yep, that's the classic thing to transition to. Other options are embedded and seriously classified work. We're now going on two decades of bias against older programmers ... that hope may be misfounded (well, unless it's some young idiot that makes the first mistake that kills tens of thousands of people, the only thing that will substantially change our field in my opinion). It would be really nice if this changes, though. It would certainly be good for our field, then again, a counterpoint to the embedded recommendation is that device manufacturers have now trained us very well in the art of resetting borked devices....
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > I also expect that income/wealth-based limits will be imposed which will cap whatever I can get well below the amount I'll need to come anywhere close to replacing what I can earn by continuing to work. Unless you were working at a near-poverty level income, Social Security has never been intended to come anywhere close to replacing what you could earn by continuing to work if you were physically able to do so. What it was intended to do, from the outset, is provide a minimum level of support to mitigate poverty in those who because of age or infirmity could no longer work. This isn't a result of changes, its all the system was ever built to do. There already are benefit limits in Social Security, and while "means testing" to reduce them further for people with other sources of income is often proposed, it doesn't seem to have much traction (beyond the existing, long-established practice of making SS benefits taxable income to those who have more than a certain amount of other income, which is a weak form of means testing.)
- napoleond 13y ago
  [In my opinion...] It's the job of young people in society to help old people. Paying a little bit more on insurance premiums is a ridiculously easy way to do that--if government services disappear by the time those young people become old, hopefully there will still be compassionate young people helping in a different way. I'm 24, and Canadian, and I'm not banking on any sort of government assistance at all when I'm old, but everything is not about me.
  - hga 13y ago
    I don't disagree with your stated ends, of the young supporting the old (after they are first supported), but the new means of doing it through a welfare state are societal suicide. For that matter, comparing it with the old model, the demand upon the youth start out much too early. In the US it looks like we might be reaching the tipping point where the young by and large can't afford to start families because the financial burdens placed upon them have grown too large. Sorry to be harsh, but Canada is at an 1.7 fertility rate (2.1 is break even) and your society is therefore dying out, so your opinion in this area is not necessarily worth very much.
    - napoleond 13y ago
      I fail to see how the fertility rates of the country I live in have anything at all to do with the validity of my opinion as stated. I think "welfare state" is a pretty loaded term, and I think America's economic troubles have almost nothing to do with health care. (Canada, for the record, has had public health care for a long time and our economic troubles are also completely unrelated.)
      - hga 13y ago
        The Panglossian opinions of a man born and raised in a doomed, dying society in the areas that are dooming it ... surely I don't have to further develop the case? I actually wasn't necessarily including health care in "welfare state", old age pensions AKA Social Security here are the traditional start (it was Bismarck who set the age at 65, BTW), but of course health care is a big one that gets added later, e.g. for 65 and up in the US in the early-mid '60s. And those supports are a critical part of all this, they tend to destroy the old model, sundering family bonds. The young can say, with complete truth, they're already paying very heavily to support the old, starting when they can least afford it, the parents can say, with much less truth in the long term if the history of government promises are any guide, that the government will take care of them (and in a greater sense, including their money being worth something when they retire). I also wasn't making a general case about our economic troubles and health care, just pointing out one existential place where the latter are contributing to what well might be the end of US society.

eavc 13y ago

Or when their parents become ill. Or for purposes of society.

hga 13y ago

Or maybe these young men realize that the Federal government's unfunded liabilities exceeding 90 trillion dollars, prior to adding Obamacare, will not be redeemed, because they simply cannot be? Seriously, I don't know your age, but are you at all confident that Social Security and Medicare will be there for you all the way to when you might die of natural causes? I seem to remember that surveys say the "young" don't believe it; if they're young enough, they don't expect to see anything coming from their FICA taxes.

DougWebb 13y ago
I'm about to turn 43, and I don't expect to see anything coming from my FICA taxes. I know that my FICA taxes are funding today's retirees, and not being held for me until I retire, and that unless the working population starts growing significantly larger soon, there won't be enough workers paying into the system when I'm ready to retire. What I expect is going to happen is that the retirement age will keep climbing, and I'll be chasing it up until I die. I also expect that income/wealth-based limits will be imposed which will cap whatever I can get well below the amount I'll need to come anywhere close to replacing what I can earn by continuing to work. I'm disappointed by this, but I accept that it's necessary to keep the system running for the people who need it more than I expect to, and I'm grateful that as a software engineer I'm likely to be able to earn a good income doing work that I enjoy for as long as I want to.
- hga 13y ago
  "I know that my FICA taxes are funding today's retirees, and not being held for me until I retire...." And this is not even completely true. From 1983 to 2009 the surplus in FICA taxes compared to expenses was just spent (there are filing cabinets with unmarketable IOUs from the government, what Al Gore's "lockbox" was all about); only in 2010 did the main Social Security fund start running a real deficit requiring money from the general fund. I wonder about the retirement age climbing concept. Among other things, it's an even heavier burden on the young, e.g. your not retiring means 1 or 2 of them won't get a job in the first place. How long will they support a system that squeezes them so much? (There's lots more than this, of course, like non-recourse student loans.) What makes people your age think you'll be able to keep your jobs? I said "1 or 2" since its quite common to replace more expensive older workers with a couple of young ones. Way too many programmers my age, a decade older, are finding it nearly impossible to stay employed in the field (another reason we don't care for the H-1B, L-1 etc. visa programs); I sincerely hope your optimism "that as a software engineer I'm likely to be able to earn a good income doing work that I enjoy for as long as I want to." is well founded. I found it more and more difficult to find work starting sometime after age 35 until I got a clue and hid my age (easy since fortunate genetics makes me look decades younger than I am ... well, until I slip up and e.g. mention PDP-11s, which once got an "How old are you?!?!!" exclamation in an interview :-).
  - DougWebb 13y ago
    "What makes people your age think you'll be able to keep your jobs?" Blind optimism? I don't really have alternatives. I do think there will be a potential for self-employment as a consultant, using my years of experience (constantly kept up to date) to keep me more productive than a team a younger programmers. I'm also hoping that the biases against older programmers will fade away as I, and the overall population of software developers, gets older. There are always alternate career paths too. My skills and experience cover the entire breadth and depth of developing software products, so I have a pretty wide range of jobs I can handle. That should help me stay employable too.
    - hga 13y ago
      If you have any talent or desire, you might want to add a bit of sysadmin work, especially setting up systems (in my case, I start with building them from "scratch", but I like that sort of thing). I.e. broaden your problem solving scope. In small companies I also generally took over the duty of doing backups, it's something I like to do and its importance cannot be overstated. If you have the aptitude for consulting (I'm too much of an introvert to do that), yep, that's the classic thing to transition to. Other options are embedded and seriously classified work. We're now going on two decades of bias against older programmers ... that hope may be misfounded (well, unless it's some young idiot that makes the first mistake that kills tens of thousands of people, the only thing that will substantially change our field in my opinion). It would be really nice if this changes, though. It would certainly be good for our field, then again, a counterpoint to the embedded recommendation is that device manufacturers have now trained us very well in the art of resetting borked devices....
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > I also expect that income/wealth-based limits will be imposed which will cap whatever I can get well below the amount I'll need to come anywhere close to replacing what I can earn by continuing to work. Unless you were working at a near-poverty level income, Social Security has never been intended to come anywhere close to replacing what you could earn by continuing to work if you were physically able to do so. What it was intended to do, from the outset, is provide a minimum level of support to mitigate poverty in those who because of age or infirmity could no longer work. This isn't a result of changes, its all the system was ever built to do. There already are benefit limits in Social Security, and while "means testing" to reduce them further for people with other sources of income is often proposed, it doesn't seem to have much traction (beyond the existing, long-established practice of making SS benefits taxable income to those who have more than a certain amount of other income, which is a weak form of means testing.)
napoleond 13y ago
[In my opinion...] It's the job of young people in society to help old people. Paying a little bit more on insurance premiums is a ridiculously easy way to do that--if government services disappear by the time those young people become old, hopefully there will still be compassionate young people helping in a different way. I'm 24, and Canadian, and I'm not banking on any sort of government assistance at all when I'm old, but everything is not about me.
- hga 13y ago
  I don't disagree with your stated ends, of the young supporting the old (after they are first supported), but the new means of doing it through a welfare state are societal suicide. For that matter, comparing it with the old model, the demand upon the youth start out much too early. In the US it looks like we might be reaching the tipping point where the young by and large can't afford to start families because the financial burdens placed upon them have grown too large. Sorry to be harsh, but Canada is at an 1.7 fertility rate (2.1 is break even) and your society is therefore dying out, so your opinion in this area is not necessarily worth very much.
  - napoleond 13y ago
    I fail to see how the fertility rates of the country I live in have anything at all to do with the validity of my opinion as stated. I think "welfare state" is a pretty loaded term, and I think America's economic troubles have almost nothing to do with health care. (Canada, for the record, has had public health care for a long time and our economic troubles are also completely unrelated.)
    - hga 13y ago
      The Panglossian opinions of a man born and raised in a doomed, dying society in the areas that are dooming it ... surely I don't have to further develop the case? I actually wasn't necessarily including health care in "welfare state", old age pensions AKA Social Security here are the traditional start (it was Bismarck who set the age at 65, BTW), but of course health care is a big one that gets added later, e.g. for 65 and up in the US in the early-mid '60s. And those supports are a critical part of all this, they tend to destroy the old model, sundering family bonds. The young can say, with complete truth, they're already paying very heavily to support the old, starting when they can least afford it, the parents can say, with much less truth in the long term if the history of government promises are any guide, that the government will take care of them (and in a greater sense, including their money being worth something when they retire). I also wasn't making a general case about our economic troubles and health care, just pointing out one existential place where the latter are contributing to what well might be the end of US society.