501–510 of 1001 posts
I've been paying into pension since I was 20, and I have health conditions where I might not even live to 50, let alone 60 or 65...
The arbitrary rules that prevent me from cashing in on the money I worked hard for is truly disgusting.
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It is entirely arbitrary. Society heavily favours capital above labour. That’s why we have very rich inheritors never working and people toiling until they are 70. It’s entirely a choice. This issue has solutions we collectively decide not to put in place.
If you stop "rich inheritors" from existing, this moves you away from the knee of the optimization frontier and you're certainly even worse off as an old person. If you can't conceptualize this as a constrained optimization problem, you're not even worth arguing with; you simply lack the tools to think about this in a useful way.
This is truly sad. As a Swede I fear my country may follow suite. The retirement age in Sweden used to be 65 and now it's 67. Looking at older people around me, most lead a much less active life after 75. So, if we were lucky we used to have some 10 good years of doing whatever we wanted before old age and age-related diseases start affecting us so much we become limited to a much smaller world. But now we have maybe…
Part of me wonders if capitalism is the solution to the Fermi Paradox because the endless chase of profits is driving us to extinction. In many Western countries, younger people are facing the prospect of never being able to own a house and never being able to retire. Beyond this basic lack of security, people are realizing the cost of having children is absolutely astronomical. In many parts of the US childcare may…
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It is. And this is the case in all western countries. It is just being realized in different ways. Fundamentalle there are 3 ways to cope 1. reduce pensions 2. Raise taxes 3. Decrease amount of benefit receivers. Denmark choose number 3
Wouldn't the fourth way be via increasing either birth rate or immigration?
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Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Explained in terms of economic theory, if everybody works and saves in time period 1, and retires and receives pension in time period 2, then... their pension is worthless, because there's infinite inflation, because no more goods and services get produced. Retirement depends on having young workers. People approaching 60, 70 simply didn't have enough kids to have good retirement. It's not…
> Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Explained in terms of economic theory, if everybody works and saves in time period 1, and retires and receives pension in time period 2, then... their pension is worthless, because there's infinite inflation, because no more goods and services get produced. You've created an impossible situation which will never exist and then offered it as an example of why taking care of the elderly, so…
Well yeah, but before government-organised pension, it was your kids taking care of you when you get older, so the system was much more balanced (or rather, only imbalanced on the micro scale, not at a mega scale we see now...)
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With an aging population and increasingly long work lives, individual stressors will increase and societal capacity for healthcare (and overall prosperity) will dwindle. Baby boomers, having lived through some of the most incredible growth in human history, will perhaps turn out to be an anomalous blip in the life expectancy stats. Also, people age differently. There's a difference between living and being alive. Not…
You get downvoted a lot, but I challenge anyone to name a country that hasn't slashed _hard_ social benefits, pensions, % of GDP for healthcare, and similar.. I get it that some countries have had a plethora of scammers (prescribing pregnancy meds to men so docs can hit quotas and get bonuses/bribes from pharmaceutical companies, people trying to fake blindness to get an early retirement, etc. But overall reduction o…
This is a common thought. It is incorrect. I’m a doctor. I have gotten pharma money for talking for their drug once, which was absolutely game-changing and which I would speak for without money (sugammadex is the generic name, if you want to look it up). I get lunch twice a year. The age of free vacations is long gone.
Seems the US will have to do this soon. Just very very unpopular. Not sure which party will actually pull the trigger.
The US may have to raise the retirement age eventually but it could put off needing to do so for a long time by making the payroll tax flat instead of regressive. Currently here is the percent various workers pay: Income Tax $10k 6.2% $50k 6.2% $100k 6.2% $150k 6.2% $200k 5.4% $300k 3.6% $700k 1.6% $1000k 1.1% $5000k 0.22% $10000k 0.11% This comes about because it is structured as a two bracket tax rate: Bracket Marg…
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Poorer individuals, who need retirement most, don't tend to live as long. Millennials and Gen Z are already victims of old, no-longer-applicable narratives (e.g. save cash, avoid debt, go to college...) and these ones about life expectancy will likely be added to the pile and used to disenfranchise us more while having no connection to reality.
Those old narritives were consiedered out dated for ever generation - but those who do it anyway tend to do well.
It's utterly insane that people need to work more and longer as technology increases productivity. A truly dystopian economic system. In 1930 Keynes projected that by 2000 their grandchildren could work 15 hours per week¹. Now the projection is that we will work more and longer in the future. And what is this labor supposed to even do? How much of even current work really increases wellbeing? Graeber's thesis of bull…
Yes, that's what strikes me as well. Where is the productivity gains going? Why are we still working 40 hour weeks, and possibly even for many more years? If I remember correctly, Denmark even removed a holiday recently. So work more days a year as well. That's the problem here. That a few people reap all the benefits of this, while the rest of us toil.
Its an intrinsically anti-human system thats starting to need less and less people. How these surplus people are dealt with isn't going to be pretty... Hopefully it results in the actors, being human and all, having a social revolution and pivoting away from it.