Term limits would fix it
Demographics in most developed countries make catering to old people the strategy to win elections.
The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis
41–50 of 250 posts
Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's happening in the US, too. I know of a senior couple where the husband recently retired after forty years of working in a professional field. They live in a house worth over $750k that is paid off. They have three new or late-model vehicles. Both the husband and wife could, if necessary, work for an income. They also collect Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance checks after enrolling for them. The common…
> Why the hell are they able to collect on that? People in the higher income brackets get far less back on SS than they paid in.
Yeah, because they aren’t in need of a social safety net.
Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis
#43Term limits would fix it
Term limits are perhaps the dumbest idea that ever plagued democracy. The idea of mandatory firing your most qualified, experienced employees in an incredibly difficult job that can only be learned with on-the-job experience is literally insane. If not for term limits, the US would have had Obama in the presidency this entire time instead of the absolute garbage scraps that were left over when they fired the only person remotely competent enough to lead them.
Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would mostly end up punishing people who live in places where voting is deliberately made difficult due to having to skip an entire workday (and its pay, if you're paid hourly instead of salaried) to go to some out-of-the-way location to vote.
A not thoroughly thought out response: Those people would heavily incentivized to protect their ability to vote.
No, they're already being suppressed. They'll take the easiest action possible to ease the pain, which means voting for whoever does away with the fines.
Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's happening in the US, too. I know of a senior couple where the husband recently retired after forty years of working in a professional field. They live in a house worth over $750k that is paid off. They have three new or late-model vehicles. Both the husband and wife could, if necessary, work for an income. They also collect Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance checks after enrolling for them. The common…
SS has to pay everyone to be viable. If you make it more complicated the politics turn into a nightmare.
Social security is already a redistribution scheme, it already is more complicated.
Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you expand on that? My concept of fairness is pretty congruent with equity.
[flagged]
I think we're talking about different things then.
Nobody is asking for equal result. Equity means sharing the rewards of productivity, instead of allowing a group of people who do nothing get rich off of other people's hard work. That's fair.
Doing good work should be rewarded!
Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's happening in the US, too. I know of a senior couple where the husband recently retired after forty years of working in a professional field. They live in a house worth over $750k that is paid off. They have three new or late-model vehicles. Both the husband and wife could, if necessary, work for an income. They also collect Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance checks after enrolling for them. The common…
> Why the hell are they able to collect on that? People in the higher income brackets get far less back on SS than they paid in.
I think it's important to emphasize that much of the in/out money asymmetry in SS is not rich versus poor ... but old versus dead.
Which, incidentally, is good and proper! OASDI is an insurance policy to cover an (alive) person faced with starvation or living in a ditch. That's a very different set of tradeoffs from an investment account that can pass to children who don't need it.
Like all insurance, it depends on a portion of people who pay in and then don't need it, even if sometimes that's because they've, er, passed beyond all material needs.
Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis
#48Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Equity? You mean equality (and that's still about rights, not pay.) Equity is just a stake in the outcome at all.
Equality: starting out at the same position, for example we have equal rights under the law
Equity: winding up at the same position, for example when everybody in a race wins the same medal, regardless of how hard they trained or how talented they are.
An apocryphal story about equity:
Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
I think we're talking about different things then. Nobody is asking for equal result. Equity means sharing the rewards of productivity, instead of allowing a group of people who do nothing get rich off of other people's hard work. That's fair. Doing good work should be rewarded!
> Nobody is asking for equal result. Equity means sharing the rewards of productivity, instead of allowing a group of people who do nothing get rich off of other people's hard work.
Your two sentences contradict each other.