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Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

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Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#31

Post by xyzzy123 »

jmyeet wrote: post #9

All 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…

> how schools increase the spread of disease

I would want to think hard about the second-order effects of preventing transmission of regular school colds & flus before trying to suppress them, which would be that people would miss out on training their immune systems while they are young & resilient.

It would be nice to get sick less often and environmental suppression in schools seems like such an obvious win... but I don't have enough understanding to know if it would really be a good thing one way or the other.

Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#32

Post by brandonmenc »

nemothekid wrote: post #24
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #20

Interesting 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?

> Does that sound correct to you? Yes? I'm not sure if I'm missing something you think is obvious. Lowering the retirement age will open up high seniority jobs that younger people can now promote into. You can see this in congress - despite millenials being in the 40s now they are rarely seen in high level political positions due to boomers and older sticking to their jobs.

> Newly elected Representatives in the 119th Congress had a median age of 47.8 years.

> Similar to the House, the incoming class of Senators in the 119th Congress was also younger, with a median age of 50.4 years.

> The average age of Representatives is 57.9 years.

Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#33

Post by Buttons840 »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #28
Buttons840 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Retirement isn't a right Society decides what people's rights are. Why should we not decide that retirement is a right? The wealthy not paying a wealth tax is not a right.

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.

Has technology improved our productivity in recently decades? How come a people with ever improving productivity can no longer support retired people?

Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#34

Post by missedthecue »

Buttons840 wrote: post #23
lenerdenator wrote: post #10

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 .

Why do you want the debt paid off? The debt has been growing for 50 years, has life gotten worse during those 50 years? What happens if we don't pay off the debt?

Eventually the interest payments crowd out most other government spending, or require significant across the board tax increases to maintain current levels of spend.

The US is currently at $1T+ a year in tax revenues that instantly go right out the door toward paying bond interest. It will likely be $2T within 10 years, even fewer if rates don't come down in that time. It's compounding and therefore exponential.

Situations like Japan are even more dire. A small increase in the interest rate results in a HUGE increase in interest expense at 260% debt to GDP ratios. Worse, their population is naturally shrinking a million people a year on account of their decades-long birth rate implosion. Hard to outgrow that.

Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#35

Post by BLKNSLVR »

nradov wrote: post #29
lenerdenator wrote: post #10

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 .

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)

Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#36

Post by BLKNSLVR »

andsoitis wrote: post #22

"There's no solution except higher birth rates or rapid productivity growth."

or a slowing of progress or a regression of the current lifestyles to which most have become accustomed.

The peeling off of some of the more recent layers that have been applied, made possible due to the abundances provided to western society by its ownership of the advanced industrialisation and information ages.

Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#37

Post by felipeerias »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #20

Interesting 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?

If pensions depend exclusively on what each person has contributed during their working years, then lowering the retirement age might theoretically help young people by opening up more senior positions for them.

However, in many developed countries today’s pensions are mainly paid for by today’s workers, often through a combination of social contributions and taxes.

In Spain, for example, the social security has a large structural deficit that gets covered by large taxes on salaries, taking money from other social services, and sovereign debt.

In other words, young workers are forced to support retirees through means that make it much harder for them to build a future of their own.

This system is kept in place because pensioners are a huge 1-issue voting block that no political party wants to antagonise. I believe that this is somehow downstream of cultural changes that have made all of society more individualistic and self-centred, incapable to work together for a common future.

Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#38

Post by betaby »

clipsy wrote: post #8
betaby wrote: post #7

Earlier 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

Most of the population was not / is not wealthy.

Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#39

Post by jmyeet »

lenerdenator wrote: post #10

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 .

The debt has ballooned because massive tax cuts have been given to the already ultra-wealthy.

In the most recent bill, the rules for writing off private jets changed such that you can take the entire write-off in one year instead of over the life of the plane. This alone is set to cost hundreds of billions of dollars [1].

Of the ~433T in debt over the entire life of the US, ~$8T of that came from Trump's first term [2].

Some people physically break their bodies and risk their lives doing necessary but relatively low-paid work. But telling baggage handlers, construction workers, agricultural workers, firemen, commeercial fishermen and agricultural workers that they need to work to 70 instead of 65 so the debt doesn't balloon while allowing Jeff Bezos a much bigger tax break in buying his 3rd private jet is utterly bananas.

[1]: https://inequality.org/article/the-big-beautiful-bill-would-...

[2]: https://www.crfb.org/blogs/how-much-did-president-trump-add-...

Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#40

Post by maxerickson »

missedthecue wrote: post #34
Buttons840 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you want the debt paid off? The debt has been growing for 50 years, has life gotten worse during those 50 years? What happens if we don't pay off the debt?

Eventually the interest payments crowd out most other government spending, or require significant across the board tax increases to maintain current levels of spend. The US is currently at $1T+ a year in tax revenues that instantly go right out the door toward paying bond interest. It will likely be $2T within 10 years, even fewer if rates don't come down in that time. It's compounding and therefore exponential. Situ…

It's more fun to think that it's the deficit that is going to the interest payments.
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