[patchule]

I don’t disagree. But it’s also true that this will set precedent for future entitlement cuts. Younger people are not served by having entitlements treated as a sacred cow. I am in the opposite camp, cuts will and already have hurt me. I just wonder if maybe we should stop perpetuating a multi-generational Ponzi scheme that allows any generation with large enough numbers (eg baby boomers) to steal all the money from the cookie jar and spend it before anyone can figure out what the heck happened. Maybe that’s a problem with democracy more generally, but that it is a problem cannot be denied. If the dominant age cohort in power is over 85 they will have little incentive to worry about the budget ir nation beyond 5 or 10 years, let alone 80 to 100 years that are relevant to today’s youngest citizens. Not that we should ditch democracy but maybe we should limit entitlements to prevent abuse.

[acdha]

It’s not a Ponzi scheme, it’s successful class warfare. We had a balanced budget at the turn of the century and could easily have addressed the Medicare gap by removing the tax giveaway to the wealthiest and reforming our healthcare system to be more like literally every peer country in the world.

Instead, we blew an enormous hole in the budget with Bush’s tax cuts and wars of choice, followed by bailing out the bankers’ fraud under Obama, and then adding trillions more debt with Trump’s first tax plan. At each and every time, we could have hit financial stability by taxing the wealthiest quintile slightly more but instead chose to take on debt giving them a tax cut instead. The way you’re talking about it as a generational issue rather than a “tax rich people like it’s 1990” issue illustrates how successful the generations of propaganda have been furthering the goal of rolling back the New Deal despite every bit of sober analysis showing that social services have significantly transformed millions of lives and restoring taxes to sustainable levels at the top brackets would have minimal impact on the rich.

[const_cast]

I don't think it's a ponzi scheme and I reject the notion it's unsustainable. Our social services are quite poor when compared to the rest of the developed world, and they seem to have figured it out.

I'm not saying we need to become Western Europe, but I am saying that it's certainly possible to have public services such as public healthcare support in the form of Medicaid sustainably.

Repeatedly, conservative fiscal voices proclaim we must cut social services in order to improve our quality of life and economic status. "Starve the Beast" has been the policy of choice for fiscal conservatives for many decades now. And, well, is it working? From where I'm standing, no. Nothing is getting cheaper. Everything is a little bit harder. And the private sector is decidedly not picking up the slack. And, I certainly do not have a lower tax burden. Why do we keep doing things when we appear to have decades worth of evidence that it does not work. I don't know, to me, it feels like insanity.

I think the most damning example is healthcare. We have private health insurance in this country and it's just bad. I don't even think we're at a point where we can humor people who say it's not that bad. No... it's bad, objectively, from every measure. We pay more per capita than any other country, including taxes, and our outcomes are consistently worse. It's losers across the board. But now we're going to be leaning into that even more with these Medicaid cuts. Which will, I'm convinced, greatly increase private insurance premiums. Sigh...

[patchule]

You do understand that those who paid into it earlier get much more out of it, right? So it is a Ponzi in that sense. We can agree to call it something else, but Ponzi is much easier than typing out “a system whereby those who got in early are guaranteed gains while later cohorts risk actual losses due to insolvency as the early cohorts cash out.”

Nursing homes (Medicaid) costs about $12,000 per person a month national average iirc. Cost cutting by fiscal conservatives is clearly not the reason nursing homes can charge so much. If anything it’s the exact opposite: it’s a monopsony so the cost is effectively set by whatever Uncle Sam decides it can pay.

The problem is not really the per capita costs though, but that the demographic time bomb has arrived and all at once a huge portion of Americans will stop paying in and start pulling out of the system that I won’t call a Ponzi. Both parties are run by boomers who have catered to boomers because most voters and donors have been boomers. As a result our politicians have done an awful job “paying it forward.” If the health care and social security situation doesn’t make that clear enough to you, then consider how they’ve left housing for the future age cohorts. Laws like prop 13 have allowed the “early in” to amass great wealth and cash out while using nimby politics to prevent new building and using loosened immigration (eg h1b, migrant farm workers), international free trade deregulation and other policy levers to increase the demand and price for the real estate and other assets they hold. A lot of tax breaks for those who were able to buy homes early, but no so much benefit for people at the other end of the not calling it a Ponzi system we have. If you see only the political parties but not demographics or wealth distribution across interest groups within both parties then you have fallen for party propaganda, the lie that the party matters more than money and special interest.

[const_cast]

> You do understand that those who paid into it earlier get much more out of it, right?

No, I don't, because this is all theoretical. Sure we've made some policy changes like raising the retirement age, but the idea that SS will be insolvent is just a conservative wet dream. So, I'll treat it as such.

People on the right have been saying SS will be insolvent since the moment the pen left the paper. Take it with a grain of salt. Please remember these people are practically salivating at the idea of privatizing SS and taking their fat slice. So try to remember their incentives and why they might spread the propaganda they do.

[patchule]

Insolvency and prohibitive costs aren’t a hypothetical but have already arrived when it comes to elder care. And it will get worse. Class warfare is a thing but it is not every thing.

[const_cast]

No, SS is not insolvent. And on the topic of elder care being prohibitively expensive, it's quiet simple: you can bleed the old dry because they don't have options. Meaning, it's not a free market, so any notions of competition vanish.

It's a problem with healthcare as a whole and that's why we see so-called "free market" healthcare fall apart. It's not a free market, and actually it is impossible for it to ever exist as a free market. Those same problems are amplified when it comes to elder care, because they're even more desperate.

I mean, think about it. I get chest pain and shortness of breath: which hospital do I go to? There's a market of exactly 1: I go to one hospital, whichever is closest and I believe has the best odds of caring for me. So there goes your free market, you actually have a monopoly. Despite the fact there are thousands of hospitals.