61–70 of 110 posts
Full Title : Why Does Raising the Retirement Age Hurt Young People? What Would It Take to Start/Restart Their Careers? Turns out trying to get people to retire later is a bad idea
Governments and career politicians do not care and will do anything to try to make the situation worse.
For 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…
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So lets raise taxes now and pay it off. Who should we tax? Should we squeeze blood from stones and try to get the poor to pay more taxes, or should we tax the wealthy? Who am I kidding. The current administration showed us--what was it? last week?--that they prefer cutting taxes for the wealthy and increasing the deficit. Republicans ALWAYS increase the deficit. Democrats usually do, but not always. It looks like we'…
You can’t tax the rich enough to pay off the debt. They already pay the overwhelming majority of taxes. One company alone— Berkshire Hathaway— paid almost $27 Billion in taxes for 2024. That’s about 5% of all corporate taxes paid. To really make money, you have to tax a bunch of smaller fish, not a handful of bigger fish. You need big numbers. That’s politically unpalatable, especially for Republicans. ( Though Democ…
Yes. This means that if we double the taxes on the wealthy we will roughly double our total taxes collected. A neat trick.
It's true that the top 50% pay 97% of taxes, but that's not the slam dunk you think it is, because the top 50% have 97.5% of the wealth (see sources).
Your suggestion to tax the poor is stupid, because the poor have nothing more to give. Even if we could extract 10x the amount of taxes from the poor, it would barely be a blip. If the bottom 50% paid 10x the taxes, then they'd be contributing, what, like 15% of all taxes? We're going to take from the poor, take food out of their mouths, for 15% more taxes? Like I said before, its like trying to squeeze blood from a stone, there's just nothing there to squeeze.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in... https://usafacts.org/articles/who-owns-american-wealth/
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Tax cuts for the wealthy were not in the BBB.
Are you saying that extending that Trump tax cuts is not a tax cut, because it's only extending and maintaining the status quo? Or are you saying the Trump tax cuts never benefited the wealthy at all?
Of course. It's disingenuous to claim that not raising taxes is a "cut".
It's the same lie as claiming a reduction in a spending increase is a "budget cut".
There are actual tax cuts in Trump's bill, but they don't apply to the wealthy.
Ah yes, the mental anguish of knowing you'll never retire because you'll either die before retirement age or they'll just keep pushing it up, so that you do.
Retirement is not an age, it's a financial position. Both my parents and grandparents were able to retire before qualifying for social security payments (and neither ever earned top 30 percentile incomes at any point in their lives). Diligently save away and invest a portion of your income and you'll be alright.
As long as you were at least (say) 65, if you retired, you got $X/month for the rest of your life.
None of this "you only get to retire if you were lucky enough to make enough your whole life to save enough that it won't run out before you die—and don't guess wrong about when that happens!" None of this "too bad, the stock market crashed just when you were starting to pull out benefits."
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The retirement age has already been pushed back about as far as it can be, barring major advancements in medicine. Maybe some of us will still be fully capable of doing software work at age 67 but those who have spent their lives doing manual labor have usually accumulated some significant disabilities by that age. They need a break.
Interesting that the current President is 79 years old (and will be 82 by the end of his term) and he took over from someone who was also 82 at the end of their term. Given that, software work at 67 should be well within cognitive limits. (I'm actually not sure if I'm being sarcastic)
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The math still has to check out. Yes I agree getting rid of the ultra wealthy improves the situation a lot and should be done. But at some point you still have too many retired people for the working population to support. At that point it's going to have to be considered that a 60 year old is still perfectly capable of working low physical demand jobs rather than spending 10-30 years on cruise ships.
Social security spending is currently about $1.5T a year, with receipts slightly lower than that and reserves of ~$3T [1]. US corporate profits are around $4 trillion a year [2]. I view that $4T as the exploitation of surplus labor value. Put another way: it wouldn't exist if it wasn't for labor. A mere 10% of that would make a significant difference to Social Security. As for your contention that a 60 year old is ca…
Certainly not all 60 year olds, but plenty of 60 year olds are still actively working in trades. There is a massive gap between, say, doing the building and installing of carpentry related things, and being a grocery store greeter.
It not unreasonable for people to take on a more teaching side of their job and doing much less of the heavy lifting parts. Being in a position to pass on knowledge and technique to the next generation is probably the best things for society and even for many of the individuals as a sense of purpose. The majority of the people I know around me don't know what to do with themselves when they aren't working, so still having something to do isn't a bad thing to them. They just don't want to keep working 40 hours a week to live paycheck to paycheck.
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So lets raise taxes now and pay it off. Who should we tax? Should we squeeze blood from stones and try to get the poor to pay more taxes, or should we tax the wealthy? Who am I kidding. The current administration showed us--what was it? last week?--that they prefer cutting taxes for the wealthy and increasing the deficit. Republicans ALWAYS increase the deficit. Democrats usually do, but not always. It looks like we'…
It will probably have to look something like western Europe with massive across the board tax increases. I make $60k a year in the USA and my tax rates are about 12%, with no VAT. They'd probably need to look more like France, where a $60k income is hit with a 42% effective tax (adjusted for progressive rates) before 20% VAT is paid at the store.