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I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

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Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#481

Post by ImJamal »

efficax wrote: post #470
ImJamal wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the person you were responding to meant ponzi scheme, not pyramid scheme. The first sentence from Wikipedia sounds quite similar to SS > A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒnzi/, Italian: [ˈpontsi]) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors Just replace investors with tax payers.

it's not a ponzi scheme either. in a ponzi scheme the top of the funnel gets rich off the funds of new investors who are expecting a return. my taxes are not an investment secretly used to make some people rich by fooling newcomers, they're explicitly directly funding the current beneficiaries.

While that is true, the problem is they have raised the age required to receive benefits in the past and they likely will do it again. Many people will die off before they receive the benefits. The system is also probably going to go insolvent in the early 2030s and the benefits will be cut by over 20%.

Many young people feel like they are going to pay into SS for 50 years to pay for the older generations and then when they retire they are going to receive less than they paid in. Obviously that may or may not be the case, but there is a general feeling that they are being gypped in order to pay for the older generation's retirement that they will not get themselves.

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#482

Post by nate_meurer »

ibobev wrote: post #473
nate_meurer wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Food and clothing are actually an argument against you here. Sure we waste a lot of both, and yet food insecurity is rare in the First World, and lack of clothing is pretty much the least significant part of poverty. Plus, government-forced redistribution reliably increases prices overall due to the increased costs of logistics and administration. There is no free lunch. If you want to argue your point, you have to a…

The real fiscal burdens on your society are your military spending and the interest on the debt you have already taken on.

Interest and military and take a distant third and fourth place respectively. Here are the rough proportions of the top US federal budget expenditures according to the Treasury Department:

- Healthcare (Medicare and Medicaid): 24%

- Social Security: 23%

- Net Interest on Federal Debt: 15%

- National Defense: 13%

And I'll point out that the enormous bill for the interest on debt is a pretty good reason to avoid ringing up so much debt in the first place.

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#483

Post by nate_meurer »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #450
nate_meurer wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wealth of the "capital class", whatever that means, is dwarfed by the debt being run up by governments. My favorite example: if you confiscated all of the wealth from all of the billionaires in the USA, it would fund the federal government for around six months. If you add state and local governments, those funds would last just weeks. The rich don't have your money. Your government does, and they're flushing it…

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Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#484

Post by krapp »

reverius42 wrote: post #480
krapp wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are the forms of capitalism actually practiced in the real world. As opposed to pure free market capitalism, which doesn't actually exist.

When did free-market capitalism stop being something to aspire to though?

No capitalist actually wants free and fair competition. A pure free market isn't the most efficient and productive means of making a profit, and they're in business to make as much money as possible.

What gets aspired to under the guise of "free market capitalism" is deregulation of the market in the ways which allow businesses to exploit consumers without consequences, such as lowering of environmental regulations or safety standards, but regulation when it hinders their competitors and lets them entrench their market position. Free market capitalism fails because of simple human nature - greed doesn't optimize for ethics, so neither do markets.

Any ideal system that simply expects people to act rationally and ethically en masse is doomed to fail, which is why capitalism only works when regulated and in the context of a society with strong social cohesion and a safety net because certain things like education and healthcare shouldn't be subject to free market dynamics.

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#485

Post by hogehoge51 »

kakwa_ wrote: post #417
hogehoge51 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The accounting system is what ensures that we can ACCOUNT for if such a statement is true or not. It also allows us to characterize and understand how the capability to generate surplus has been distributed etc etc. There is no single lump of goods and services, or a single lump of surplus. There is an economic problem of ensuring such are created in surplus and distributed to those who need them. A surplus of lawn m…

The debt amount is very roughly proportional to the size of the economy. It's also a system that is unstable in non-booming economies, drifts over time and needs periodic resets (through revolution, debt cancelling or inflation for example). When dealing with material well-being, it makes much more sense to focus on goods and services and frame things more in the line of "would you trade a bit of wealth (smaller car…

I agree with the system you describe, i tend to disagree with the conclusion.

I suspect the size of the debt is just a "dc offset" and not the main signal. While important, maybe not as "information-ally" significant as it's size would suggest. Still it is probably hiding something, a subtle bug in the accounting, and that something contributes to the frequent cycles of debt-jubilees, revolutions, upheavals etc.

Now the real question you have posed is what is missed in the debate - most wealth in our society is captured in the make up and choice of goods and services consumed, and what is the contribution of a bias towards wealthy consumption here? e.g. in my country there were about 150 luxury yacht sales totaling ~$4billion, vs ~80,000 luxury car sales @ ~$15billion, vs total car sales of ~1,000,000 at ~$100billion. The annual cost of our public disability insurance scheme is ~$50billion. The "sharing" seems to have a significant access to resources compared to luxury on those accounts. I personally think the public disability insurance scheme causes harmful distortion to the broader economy while also meeting the important needs of some members of society.

My gut feel the issue is not ideological or political or a luxury preference, it's structural - the economy is not structured to deliver the correct set of needs, and this is due to real material constraints that have always constrained the economic problem. Not in terms that just the wrong top down decisions are being made, but that the correct bottom up decisions are prevented from being made. If you apply a model of computation complexity, feedback and iterative improvement - bottom up generally has more access to information and compute to directly address problems, while top-down can occasionally deal with global biases and accumulated error.

One true material constraint is the scarcity of competence and accountability. Wealth accumulation is the natural consequence of that material constraint. Top down "political & ideological decisions" are generally the enemy of competence and accountability.

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#486

Post by jfil »

raffael_de wrote: post #217
Taikonerd wrote: post #27

If you read this article and feel worried about your financial situation if you become disabled, you might look into long-term disability insurance (LTD). It's a policy where, if you become disabled to the point where you can't work, it pays out $X per month, every year until you're 65. And if you're partly disabled and have to cut back your hours, some policies compensate you for those lost wages. These LTD policies…

don't forget the legal costs insurance to pay the lawyer making the LTD insurance actually pay and a second legal costs insurance to pay the lawyer suing the primary LCI as they will likely claim that case isn't covered by their policy.

Bingo. And remember, these lawsuits to establish the magnitude of the payout/severity of the injury: you'll be going through them shortly after sustaining a disabling injury.

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#487

Post by jfil »

inigyou wrote: post #95
b3lvedere wrote: post #23

"But I am trying to believe there is more to a human life than how efficiently it converts energy into labor." There absolutely is. Labor can be fullfilling and give joy, but for most people it is just an easy tool on how to survive and hopefully have some comfort as well. Do not ever feel ashamed of your labor and even more, do not ever feel ashamed of not doing labor if you don't want to. You have one life in this…

They may not feel ashamed, but they'll still feel dead when they have no food and shelter.

This thought pattern of "I will die if I don't work" comes up so often. The streets are not filled with bodies. There are people who are chronically unemployed, and women who left the workforce to care for their children and never returned/returned after 15 years, and they're not dead...

There are a lot more ways of living in the world than our main story here in the West.

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#488

Post by jfil »

anon48293 wrote: post #447

I didn’t have to read to the bottom to notice the autism. I feel that’s the biggest “disability” there. If you can write so many posts, you can get an office job or get paid for writing.

I think it would be wonderful if there were more work arrangements that fit a person who can write a lot - but intermittently and unpredictably. Right now, that's not the case. That's one of the author's main points. (Even for things like highly-paid, high-skill part time work: its as rare as hen's teeth)

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#489

Post by jfil »

everdrive wrote: post #76

I bristle a bit when it comes to discussing productivity an an ill that is _specific_ to capitalism. It's certainly an ill of capitalism as well, but I don't know many other systems where productivity is not valued and lack of productivity does not come with downsides. As another commenter has pointed out, the surest ally in this case is family. Not all families are tight, but families are largely the ones who will t…

I appreciate your comments here. My takeaway is that the lack of family bonds/expectation of contribution within the family is a bigger factor than simply Capitalism. The key to resilience is tighter family bonds & neighborly bonds (those 2000 villagers would absolutely give you favours if they liked your art and you made some for them)
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