[alexey-salmin]

You can't eat assets. Retirees need goods and services, these should be produced by the workers and handed over to retirees for free.

No wealth redistribution mechanism can solve the fundamental problem of less workers handing over more and more of their produce to the growing population of retirees.

[triceratops]

> You can't eat assets

Are farmland, greenhouses, livestock, tractors, silos full of grain, and refrigerated warehouses packed with produce not "assets"?

> Retirees need goods and services

Which are produced by...assets. Factories, labs, intellectual property.

> these should be produced by the workers and handed over to retirees for free

Well not exactly "free". Retirees make contributions to the retirement system throughout their career.

> No wealth redistribution mechanism can solve the fundamental problem of less workers handing over more and more of their produce to the growing population of retirees.

The solution is tax the workers' output (productivity and asset growth), not their salaries. I don't know what you mean by "wealth redistribution" here.

[alexey-salmin]

> Are farmland, greenhouses, livestock, tractors, silos full of grain, and refrigerated warehouses packed with produce not "assets"?

The elderly can't eat that directly unless they're in a good health and can be put to work on a farm.

> Which are produced by...assets. Factories, labs, intellectual property.

In the end nothing is produced by "assets", things are always produced by people with various degrees of automation. This makes the balance between the number of people who are working and the number of people who aren't the key factor.

> Well not exactly "free". Retirees make contributions to the retirement system throughout their career.

Contributions to the economy of the past give them some moral grounds to claim the share of the economy today. But the reality is, an old man today is someone who consumes but doesn't produce. Society feeds them and gets nothing in return. Except for old people who meaningfully help to raise grandchildren or find other ways to be useful.

> The solution is tax the workers' output (productivity and asset growth), not their salaries. I don't know what you mean by "wealth redistribution" here.

There are many ways of how a percentage of GDP can be diverted to the elderly: all kinds of taxes including taxes on salary and assets, stocks and bonds, stashes of cash under the mattress etc.

I'm making a more high-level point: regardless of the mechanism, the more the elderly, the more GDP you need to divert to them. Which means the rest of the population gets less and also less gets invested into the future growth. It's a fundamental problem, which doesn't depend on which exact tax you plan to apply.

[triceratops]

> The elderly can't eat that directly unless they're in a good health and can be put to work on a farm.

No but you need fewer farmhands to produce that food than you did 100 years ago. And you'll need even fewer in another 20 years.

> the more the elderly, the more GDP you need to divert to them

In absolute terms, sure. Proportionately, hopefully not because that would mean we aren't meaningfully increasing productivity anymore.

> This makes the balance between the number of people who are working and the number of people who aren't the key factor...Which means the rest of the population gets less and also less gets invested into the future growth. It's a fundamental problem, which doesn't depend on which exact tax you plan to apply.

I guess we have to agree to disagree about this. Worker productivity is 6 times what it was 80 years ago. At a high level 1 worker can support 6 times as many retirees as they could in the past.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHPBS

So if the math worked out then it works out today.

[kortilla]

80 years ago a worker couldn’t support a retiree. The entire point of social security was that initial contributors back then were gonna get more out of it than they put it. But it was OK because the contributors would always grow faster.

So it doesn’t matter if productivity is up. If it went from 1 worker supporting 1/10th of a retiree to 4/5ths, the math is still broken, significantly.