[peterwwillis]

Why would you expect it to continue existing just because it's popular now? Lots of things that were popular were eventually changed or removed.

The consequences are serious and the time it takes to determine whether it's worth worrying about is in decades. It's like global warming. If you wait to find out what happens, it's too late.

In South Korea, suicide rates are high because there is no social safety net. Old people just kill themselves. If SS gets made effectively defunct, what recourse will 2/3 of the aging population with no retirement have?

[dionidium]

> Why would you expect it to continue existing just because it's popular now?

I'd like to turn this on its head: why are you particularly worried about Social Security? Any government program could disappear in the next 30 years. So why is your focus on Social Security? Why is this subthread so predictable?

It's because of a deliberate, targeted, FUD-campaign against Social Security by people who are ideologically opposed to it. Their fears are not genuine. They oppose the program in principle and benefit by sowing doubt. That's why you're making this comment in this thread and not in some other thread about some other government program.

> It's like global warming. If you wait to find out what happens, it's too late.

I don't think it's generally useful to pick holes in analogies, but this one is too big to ignore. Social Security is a man-made program. If we want to change it, we can just change it. At any time. For any reason. I'm not sure it could actually be any less like climate.

[Avshalom]

>why are you particularly worried about Social Security?

because the 1 of the 2 political parties in the USA, the one currently holding all three branches of the federal government, has been quite publicly trying to cut it for decades. Even if they don't get it accomplished today they have another 40-50 years worth of trying before "millennials" hit retirement age.

[dionidium]

Oh, right, so we have to distinguish two things:

1. One party wants to cut Social Security. This is obviously true.

2. That same party wants to convince you that it has to be cut or otherwise changed in significant ways or it will fail entirely -- which brings us back to #1.

In other words, #1 is driving #2, not the other way around. If you're worried about #1, then I'm with you. You should be. But this is generally presented as a worry about #2, which is really just a cynical ploy to get back to #1.

They want to cut Social Security for ideological reasons. But their plan is to convince you that it needs to be done for practical reasons. It's a pretty good plan that seems to be working quite well, because a whole bunch of regular folks who don't know what the word "insolvent" means are sure it applies to Social Security.

[ryandrake]

Any politician who even hints at getting rid of Social Security will find them self unelected quickly. Old people disproportionately vote. It won’t go away.

The real question is: will I be able to retire on what little SS will provide, and the answer is likely no, given how little it is nominally, plus inflation.

[dragonwriter]

> The real question is: will I be able to retire on what little SS will provide

SS is a safety-net pension, not intended to be a good retirement on its own, only to mitigate (not even eliminate) poverty should other retirement arrangements fail.

So, yeah, unless your standards are really low, you don't be able to retire on it alone. But that's pretty much by design. It wasn't designed to replace employer pensions.

[dionidium]

The form of this argument is very popular wrt to the minimum wage, too. But setting aside the claim's veracity -- obviously, people had conflicting desires and intentions even at the time -- it's not a very convincing style of argument. We can make these programs whatever we want them to be. I'm not sure why I'm supposed to care very much about the intentions of the people who happened to write the original law.

Even if it happens to be true (and, again, it's not clearly true), it's not a very interesting discussion (outside of a history course) and certainly not one that helps us navigate the best path forward at the present time. Your own references to employer pensions demonstrate how totally irrelevant the original intentions now are, since such pensions have waned in influence significantly in the intervening years.

[dragonwriter]

> The form of this argument is very popular wrt to the minimum wage, too.

I've never seen it; it's pretty clear that minimum wage isn't a fallback in case of private arrangement failure (that's welfare, not minimum wage.)

> We can make these programs whatever we want them to be.

Sure, we could make a general universal first-resort pension. SS has never be designed to be or marketed as that, so you shouldn't expect it to be. (That's orthogonal to whether you should reform it to be one, or replace it with one; a portable, universal, public, actuarially sound defined benefit pensions is, IMO, a great idea.)

> I'm not sure why I'm supposed to care very much about the intentions of the people who happened to write the original law.

I don't particularly care what you care about. The discussion was over various perspectives of the decline of social security, starting with whether it would fail to be there—it was then suggested that it would for political reasons, but the real question was whether it would be an adequate retirement. I was pointing out that the fact that it was perceived as unlikely to be should be unsurprising and not a sign of decline, since it never had been in the past and was never deisgned to serve that purpose.

[dionidium]

Re: your last paragraph, I'd say fair enough :)

Re: the form of the argument as it applies to minimum wage, it works like this:

Argument: "Minimum wage isn't enough for a family to live on!"

Response: "It was never intended to be enough to live on. It's for teenagers, etc, etc."

Note that this path leads us away from all the interesting questions about the minimum wage and into an argument about what lived in the hearts of the people who wrote the original law. That's the inevitable result of this kind of argument and the thing I'm objecting to.