Obviously we need more immigration to solve this problem. A larger pool of unskilled labor would increase wages. As everyone knows, when you increase the supply, the price always rises.
Immigration system as ponzi scheme to pay for old people?
Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die
141–150 of 198 posts
Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer is that SS age gets pushed back along with average lifespan
The answer is universal healthcare, which then becomes a sunk cost for the entire population (Medicare->OneCare). The answer is removing the social security tax cap at ~$120K (this causes SS to become solvent in perpetuity immediately ). This will be done regardless if the SS fund goes broke and must be propped up with the general fund, its just how long you want to kick the can for. (EDIT: Medicare has no cap on the…
The whole point of social security is that it is a social insurance program. It's funded out of workers wages, and paid back to workers in proportion to what they paid in.
If you remove the cap on social security contributions without removing the cap on payouts, how is it anything but a special surcharge on people who earn money from wages?
Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die
#143Why don't these people move to a place where it is much cheaper to live? Costa Rica , Panama, and Mexico all come to mind. Living in the US is expensive and you can live much cheaper in other countries and have the adventure of living in another country. https://internationalliving.com/countries/costa-rica/cost-of...
Do the countries you mention want immigrants who are not likely to benefit their economy significantly and who probably don't have fluency in the local language?
Yes, there are plenty of tropical countries with visa categories specifically for retired westerners. The requirements are often super-lenient (in Thailand you need to show a bank balance of $25,000 or $2,000 a month in income and you can stay as long as you want on a retiree visa).
Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer is universal healthcare, which then becomes a sunk cost for the entire population (Medicare->OneCare). The answer is removing the social security tax cap at ~$120K (this causes SS to become solvent in perpetuity immediately ). This will be done regardless if the SS fund goes broke and must be propped up with the general fund, its just how long you want to kick the can for. (EDIT: Medicare has no cap on the…
The whole point of social security is that it is a social insurance program. It's funded out of workers wages, and paid back to workers in proportion to what they paid in. If you remove the cap on social security contributions without removing the cap on payouts, how is it anything but a special surcharge on people who earn money from wages?
> If you remove the cap on social security contributions without removing the cap on payouts, how is it anything but a special surcharge on people who earn money from wages?
I never said it wasn't. I can hardly shed a tear (for myself included) for anyone making over $120K/year who pays an extra few percents of tax on income to prevent elderly poverty.
Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die
#145Here's a breakdown of the US 2015 combined (Federal, State, Local) government spend: Total Spend: 6.18tn Total Revenue: 6.08tn Healthcare: 1.32tn (21.3%) Pension: 1.20tn (19.7%) Education: 0.93tn (14.8%) Defense: 0.80tn (13.1%) Welfare: 0.50tn (8.2%) Other*: 1.43tn (23.1%) *Other = Protection, Transportation, General Government, Interest Currently, social security is taking in ~$74bn less in payroll taxes than it pay…
> Expenses increase for the working-age population.
This only happens when your tax policy is setup to fund welfare through the working poor. As an economy as a whole the US has doubled in inflation adjusted wealth in just over ten year (since 2003) and through a recession. It is obvious that the overhead of welfare has not in any way stymied US economic growth, which simply means if the tax burden of the elderly is too great upon the working poor then you are taxing the wrong source of income to fund your retirement program.
Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it unfair that I'm expected to make sacrifices while I'm young to ensure a comfortable retirement and also have to pay for other's retirements because they failed to do so.
Why? Why is that? Say you encountered a local situation where you meet someone in real danger, and for some contrived reason only you are able to help them (say, they knock at the door of your remote house during a blizzard or something, if it helps to make it concrete.) The majority of society would say it is your ethical duty to help a person in such a circumstance, even at moderate inconvenience to yourself. You w…
>The majority of society would say it is your ethical duty to help a person in such a circumstance, even at moderate inconvenience to yourself.
A stranger man knocks on the door of a single mother with a young daughter (yes, I am piggy backing on stereotypical social norms). Does she have an ethical duty to put both herself and her child at potentially great risk (which is probably largely overblown by 24 hours news and crime based TV shows)?
>but in general, most people would frown on your choice of a fancier car or a European vacation over someone else's life, in this kind of local, specific scenario.
The difficulty is when they enjoyed their European vacation in the past while you saved up for yours now.
Or to put in a more generalized term, the ethical obligation to share wealth even with those who are themselves responsible for not having wealth encourages one to never save up wealth to begin with (not in an all or none sense, but as a pressure which can be increased or decreased).
Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die
#147Here's a breakdown of the US 2015 combined (Federal, State, Local) government spend: Total Spend: 6.18tn Total Revenue: 6.08tn Healthcare: 1.32tn (21.3%) Pension: 1.20tn (19.7%) Education: 0.93tn (14.8%) Defense: 0.80tn (13.1%) Welfare: 0.50tn (8.2%) Other*: 1.43tn (23.1%) *Other = Protection, Transportation, General Government, Interest Currently, social security is taking in ~$74bn less in payroll taxes than it pay…
You have a gap of .1 tn (a hundred billion dollars) of spend over revenue, implying an annual deficit of that amount. From what I read the Federal deficit was >$400 billion in 2015 and the majority of states and municipalities seem to run either at neutral or a slight deficit. What am I missing here or how does the math work out?
I sourced spending data from http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/ and revenue data from http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/. Lots of good links and transparency wrt data sourcing (mostly from gov) and calculations of totals.
In 2015 Federal spend was 3.8t and revenue was 3.2t, so there was a gap of -600bn there as you mentioned. States ran a surplus of 200bn and local ran a deficit of -400bn. Intergovernmental transfers amounted to 600bn. So the total deficit was -200bn (the top level numbers are rounded to one decimal place).
Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die
#148Before Social Security, over 70% of seniors died in poverty. Today, that number is less than 10%. The amount of transfer payments to the elderly is so much larger than to any other age group, but unless you're willing to let those below the median income die in abject poverty, it's necessary.
I'm not an advocate of "debtors prisons" as a traditional concept, but I'm also very reluctant to sympathize with those living on a fixed income who refuse to pick up and move to an area where the cost of living adequately aligns with their financial means. As in, if a person is old and broke, they should be grateful to have the freedom to move to a cheap place to live, not bemoan that they can no longer afford their…
hey man; what you do is ..... do you know what the definition of is, is!
Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
The woman in the article receives $1390/month in COLA'd fixed income and free ''major medical'' health care. I can tell you from personal experience: this is ''enough to actually live on''. It's not super comfortable but then we're talking about someone who worked for decades and ended up with a net worth of zero. I'm not assigning blame I'm just restating a fact. Where my family is from in the midwest a studio apart…
She's over $50 000 in debt. You can't just discount that from this type of analysis.
Assuming it's consumer credit (and not student loans) then she's a prime candidate for bankruptcy which would wipe out all her loans. She burns her credit score but it's an easy (probably necessary) trade-off to make. She just needs to move somewhere where her monthly expenses are less than her monthly fixed income, and she will be fine (from a financial perspective).
Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Edit: for those of you saying 'yes': who decides what is "fair"? This applies to basically everything that a society does. Even in small local elections you have decisions where a significant portion of the voters don't get their way, and those sorts of elections tend to be over things that people largely agree on (paving roads and plowing snow and ...).
This applies to basically everything that a society does. I completely agree. Couldn't we say, then, that the current system of traffic fines (or at least the one that applies to the woman in this article) is something that has been approved by our society...rich and poor alike?
Would that previously existing agreement somehow render a new agreement less fair?
I don't think so.