| > 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. |
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.