At this point I just want the debt incurred by the electoral decisions of the last fifty years paid off. If that means retirement gets pushed back, well, shrugs .
I think they reverse mortgaged it.
Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?
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Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?
#12Oh, this is so incredibly coordinated to what I was doing just a minute ago, which is checking one of my Pension funds and realizing it recovered from a massive hit back in March. I was thinking about how futile the whole thing is... I just know this money will never be mine, and I will work until I die (if I'm lucky enough). Oh well, I guess better get some sleep, back to the office tomorrow...
Pension? Job? What’s that like? /s
Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?
#13Oh, this is so incredibly coordinated to what I was doing just a minute ago, which is checking one of my Pension funds and realizing it recovered from a massive hit back in March. I was thinking about how futile the whole thing is... I just know this money will never be mine, and I will work until I die (if I'm lucky enough). Oh well, I guess better get some sleep, back to the office tomorrow...
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Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?
#14At this point I just want the debt incurred by the electoral decisions of the last fifty years paid off. If that means retirement gets pushed back, well, shrugs .
I think they reverse mortgaged it.
More-or-less, but...
It's not just the age at which the government lets you claim OASDI and Medicare. It's also the fact that in the US at least, we've basically set up the entire economy around the idea of paying retirement/pension funds first and foremost, C-suites second, and the people creating the actual value third.
Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, at that time personal taxes were not at that level and sales taxes mostly didn't exist.
Taxes on the very wealthy were dramatically higher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1935
But there were a lot of deductions and shelters and nobody actually paid those rates except maybe Elvis.
Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taxes on the very wealthy were dramatically higher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1935
But there were a lot of deductions and shelters and nobody actually paid those rates except maybe Elvis.
It would be nice if you shared some extensive numbers to quantify that before I take your word for it. Like total government tax revenue vs upper-percentile incomes and upper-percentile incomes vs actual realized income tax percentages. Like, "here is what the median person making 5M in 1955 paid as an effective rate, this is how many of those people there were as a percentage of the population" and the equivalents for the inflation-adjusted people today. Let's look at some of those deductions too - did a 90% top marginal rate in the 40s cause people to make societally useful donations to get deductions? That could still be very beneficial compared to buying bigger yachts.
Top-end compensation has gone through the roof compared to "regular" worker compensation since we started cutting tax rates on the rich. And we also have no shortage of deductions and shelters today either.
So why shouldn't we raise the rates back to at least reduce the consolidation and government revenue trends that have happened since we lowered them?
Here's one quick source that 5 seconds on Google turned up - https://city-countyobserver.com/did-people-really-pay-91-tax... - estimates suggest that top earners in the 50s payed a 42-45% effective tax rate vs today's 26-28% effective tax rate. That's a pretty giant difference! Interestingly, despite that, the top 1% paid a bit smaller of a fraction of total tax income (30-35% vs 40% today) suggesting that it may have helped spread the money around so that the 2-5%, 5-15%, etc parts of the population were relatively better off compared to the top 1%. Less of the top 1% hitting the top marginal rate suggests that it's a rather useful incentive for keeping your salaries less obscene.
Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?
#17All 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 wea…
> 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...
Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?
#18Oh, this is so incredibly coordinated to what I was doing just a minute ago, which is checking one of my Pension funds and realizing it recovered from a massive hit back in March. I was thinking about how futile the whole thing is... I just know this money will never be mine, and I will work until I die (if I'm lucky enough). Oh well, I guess better get some sleep, back to the office tomorrow...
I would look at the real value of the dollar before assuming the real value of it went up. With how bad [actual] inflation is/will be, it wouldn’t be surprising if your pension actually dropped in real value.
Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?
#19For the US only:
Because due to the current brain dead policies of the GOP in the US, life expectancies in the US are falling.
So instead of storing up Social Security by making the ultra rich pay their fair share, people who do real work to enrich these people will have to work longer. That means they will have a shorter and less healthy retirement.
Now, I am guessing about 40% of people in the US will never be able to retire. I know a couple in that situation right now.
The GOP has been trying to kill of Social Security for almost 50 years, I fully expect they will succeed in 10 years or so.
Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?
#20Interesting claim - let's see if it passes the sniff test.
It's very unlikely that we are actually currently at an ideal retirement age on the margin where a move in either direction hurts. If raising the retirement age hurts young people, then lowering the retirement age probably helps young people.
Does that sound correct to you? Would lowering the retirement age now help young people?