[jmyeet]

All of this is by design. You get:

- Lower taxes for the ultra-wealthy

- People working longer to make the ultra-wealthy slightly wealthier; and

- Younger people getting padi less, again making the ultra-wealthy slightly more wealthy.

The entire policy and government appratus of the US in particular is designed as a massive wealth transfer from the poor and young to the old and wealthy.

There is no reason why the wealthiest countries on earth can't afford to let people who are 60 years old retire. Other than of course the wealthy would have to pay slightly more in taxes.

I can't find it now but I saw an article talking about all the social and policy ideas that unwittingly got tested in the Covid pandemic. The effects of giving money to poor people (it's not the moral hazard it's made out to be), how schools increase the spread of disease and a whole host of others.

[lenerdenator]

> There is no reason why the wealthiest countries on earth can't afford to let people who are 60 years old retire.

There is, though.

The 60+ year-olds wanting to retire spent the last four-to-six decades racking up a metric crapload of public and private debt. Not only did they spend a lot, they seriously weakened the ability for revenues to cover said debts. Severe bureaucratic handicapping of revenue agencies, means that an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars in tax go uncollected every year in the United States alone [1]. Imagine what the federal deficit looks like if the US had to borrow a few hundred billion less each year. It's far from zero, but it's better than it looks now.

Retirement isn't a right, it's a math problem. For most of human history, if you lived long enough to get too old to do labor, you were expected to do something (usually helping with childrearing or teaching skills to younger generations) in order to lessen the burden of your existence to others, mainly your family. Now that most labor isn't actually physical and people are living longer, there's less excuse for doing nothing for 10+ years off of savings besides just wanting to. Unfortunately, given the size of deficits in lots of Western nations and the stagnating wages of the younger generations, those retirement accounts are becoming more attractive as a way to pay off debt that the people holding those accounts created.

[1] https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-forgoes-hundr...

[Buttons840]

> Retirement isn't a right

Society decides what people's rights are. Why should we not decide that retirement is a right?

The wealthy not paying a wealth tax is not a right.

[SchemaLoad]

The math still has to check out. Yes I agree getting rid of the ultra wealthy improves the situation a lot and should be done. But at some point you still have too many retired people for the working population to support.

At that point it's going to have to be considered that a 60 year old is still perfectly capable of working low physical demand jobs rather than spending 10-30 years on cruise ships.

[Buttons840]

Has technology improved our productivity in recently decades? How come a people with ever improving productivity can no longer support retired people?

[SchemaLoad]

Partially went to rich peoples yachts and space programs, partially impacted by an aging population/declining birth rates, and partially went to the fact people consume more stuff and live longer.

[jmyeet]

Social security spending is currently about $1.5T a year, with receipts slightly lower than that and reserves of ~$3T [1].

US corporate profits are around $4 trillion a year [2].

I view that $4T as the exploitation of surplus labor value. Put another way: it wouldn't exist if it wasn't for labor. A mere 10% of that would make a significant difference to Social Security.

As for your contention that a 60 year old is capable of working. Doing what? The prospects are already dire for people who are laid off in their 50s. You want them to be cashiers at Safeway at minimum wage? Minimum wage isn't even a living wage.

Many of these people have done physically demanding but completely necessary jobs their entire lives. Their bodies can be wrecked.

I don't know your circumstances but generally speaking I see a lot of "tech-hubris" on HN. People who skew younger and are very privileged to work in tech. The hubris part is being young, many think this will go on forever. The reality is ageism is rampant in tech. The other part is thinking you won't be impacted by automation (and AI).

Will you be bagging groceries until you're 67-69 because Amazon made an AI that now does your job?

[1]: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/assets.html

[2]: https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_corporate_profits_quarterl...

[lenerdenator]

> As for your contention that a 60 year old is capable of working. Doing what? The prospects are already dire for people who are laid off in their 50s. You want them to be cashiers at Safeway at minimum wage? Minimum wage isn't even a living wage.

Not to speak for the other commenter, but if you want to see some real change in people's voting patterns, do exactly that.

As far as their bodies being wrecked, well, that's the actual intention of OASDI, more popularly known as Social Security. Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance. If we stopped giving out checks to people just for getting to 65, we might be able to preserve that safety for future generations. After all, it's in the name: insurance. You don't get to collect any other sort of insurance just for being alive past a certain time, because that would make that insurance fund unsustainable.

[xboxnolifes]

> As for your contention that a 60 year old is capable of working. Doing what? The prospects are already dire for people who are laid off in their 50s. You want them to be cashiers at Safeway at minimum wage? Minimum wage isn't even a living wage.

Certainly not all 60 year olds, but plenty of 60 year olds are still actively working in trades. There is a massive gap between, say, doing the building and installing of carpentry related things, and being a grocery store greeter.

It not unreasonable for people to take on a more teaching side of their job and doing much less of the heavy lifting parts. Being in a position to pass on knowledge and technique to the next generation is probably the best things for society and even for many of the individuals as a sense of purpose. The majority of the people I know around me don't know what to do with themselves when they aren't working, so still having something to do isn't a bad thing to them. They just don't want to keep working 40 hours a week to live paycheck to paycheck.

[lenerdenator]

Oh, I'd definitely tax the wealthy.

But that's not going to do enough. The Boomers didn't have enough kids, and the ones that they did have face stagnant wages and international competition for jobs.

[Detrytus]

There is nothing wrong with living off of your savings. After all it’s the money you earned so you don’t owe anyone anything for it, and you can spend it as you see fit.

The problem with retirement schemes today is that most people’s savings are not enough to pay for their retirement so the younger generations need to chip in.

[Marsymars]

“Savings” are just an abstraction - people can’t literally live off their savings - they trade their savings for labour, and the system is rigged so that those doing the labour have disproportionately little power to set the exchange rate, and the value of savings get juiced to benefit those holding them.

We could shuffle some numbers around with fiscal, monetary and labour policies in ways that would result in far more wealth flowing from the old to the young, rather than from the young to the old as is happening now, and it would still be true that “people earned their savings and can spend it how they see fit”.

[lenerdenator]

Well, they could be enough for retirement for a lot of people. That'll mean downsizing and reining in expectations, though.

As for the younger generations, they have even less wealth than those of retirement age. Why should they chip in?

[xyzzy123]

> how schools increase the spread of disease

I would want to think hard about the second-order effects of preventing transmission of regular school colds & flus before trying to suppress them, which would be that people would miss out on training their immune systems while they are young & resilient.

It would be nice to get sick less often and environmental suppression in schools seems like such an obvious win... but I don't have enough understanding to know if it would really be a good thing one way or the other.