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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?

#71

Post by fsckboy »

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…

>Eventually the interest payments crowd out most other government spending

false.

you are neglecting economic growth which increases tax receipts but does not increase the debt.

if government expenditure grows faster than economic growth, yes, bankruptcy is in the future.

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

#72

Post by fsckboy »

Buttons840 wrote: post #63
RickJWagner wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You can’t tax the rich enough to pay off the debt. They already pay the overwhelming majority of taxes. 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 stupi…

>Yes. This means that if we double the taxes on the wealthy we will roughly double our total taxes collected. A neat trick.

no, you won't, people change their financial decisions in the face of taxes. increasing taxes will slow the economy, bringing in a change of party in the whitehouse and congress, and taxes will be lowered again. high taxes don't work, and people don't like them.

>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).

taxes are on income, not wealth. the reason those percentage numbers and the wealth numbers come out the same is because poor people pay small or zero tax so it's as if their income is not counted

higher taxes on the wealthy will not benefit the poor, their taxes don't get lowered. However slowing the economy does hurt the poor

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

#73

Post by BLKNSLVR »

Qem wrote: post #68
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

They have lots of supporting staff, mostly younger than themselves, to do the heavy lifting. Some politicians developing dementia while holding office must practically be puppeteered through term by their staff. See https://theintercept.com/2023/09/12/national-security-dement...

Good lord. Depressing. There's no way they should be holding such positions of responsibility.

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

#74

Post by general1726 »

daveland wrote: post #2

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

Unless you are having state pensions and taking money from taxable population and giving it to pensioners. This group keeps getting bigger thanks to constantly improving medical care, while taxable population is getting smaller thanks to declining birthrates.

Cutting pensions would probably cause massive riots, so raising retirement age is only logical way forward to keep this social pyramid scheme alive a little bit longer.

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

#75

Post by schrodinger »

danaris wrote: post #67
missedthecue wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Retirement used to be an age, when we had defined-benefit pensions. 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 yo…

Yes, this. I know this type of comment is discouraged by Hacker News but I really want to help you emphasize that retirement used to be a guarantee by the US government after paying into social security all your life. Now… I don't know.

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

#77

Post by FreakLegion »

WalterBright wrote: post #52
Buttons840 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Tax cuts for the wealthy were not in the BBB.

The BBB increased the QSBS exclusion and gross asset value limit by 50% and quadrupled the SALT deduction, among other things. I guess you could argue the meaning of "for the wealthy" here, but it would be hard to do in good faith.

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

#78

Post by lenerdenator »

Buttons840 wrote: post #25
lenerdenator wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, mean…

> 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.

Oh, I'd definitely tax the wealthy.

But that's not going to do enough. The Boomers didn't have enough kids, and the ones that they did have face stagnant wages and international competition for jobs.

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

#79

Post by lenerdenator »

jmyeet wrote: post #50
SchemaLoad wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> As for your contention that a 60 year old is capable of working. Doing what? The prospects are already dire for people who are laid off in their 50s. You want them to be cashiers at Safeway at minimum wage? Minimum wage isn't even a living wage.

Not to speak for the other commenter, but if you want to see some real change in people's voting patterns, do exactly that.

As far as their bodies being wrecked, well, that's the actual intention of OASDI, more popularly known as Social Security. Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance. If we stopped giving out checks to people just for getting to 65, we might be able to preserve that safety for future generations. After all, it's in the name: insurance. You don't get to collect any other sort of insurance just for being alive past a certain time, because that would make that insurance fund unsustainable.

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

#80

Post by lenerdenator »

Detrytus wrote: post #27
lenerdenator wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, mean…

There is nothing wrong with living off of your savings. After all it’s the money you earned so you don’t owe anyone anything for it, and you can spend it as you see fit. The problem with retirement schemes today is that most people’s savings are not enough to pay for their retirement so the younger generations need to chip in.

Well, they could be enough for retirement for a lot of people. That'll mean downsizing and reining in expectations, though.

As for the younger generations, they have even less wealth than those of retirement age. Why should they chip in?

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