| The Social Security system relies on creating a debt of unborn children to older people based on those older people having already paid now dead people, so keeping it solvent requires more meat for the tax machine. A pyramid inversion means the old keep voting for OPM from the young, using their numbers to crush them, meanwhile there are fewer and fewer young to actually pay it. Eventually creating instability, couple this with entitlement "I paid that dead guy, so that kid owes me!" (of course, abstracted, as "the government owes me" to hide the kinetics) and you are in a bad spot. ---------- edit: reply to below since I am throttled ----- yes under any system youth are needed. But SS creates a tragedy of the commons. Because retired get benefit obligation of children whether they have/adopt/foster the children or not. In most other systems, the link is more direct, so there is greater incentive to have or adopt child and provide investment in the child, as their success is directly linked to yours. In SS system you can reneg on most of the responsibility of creating the engines of the next generation but still simply scalp that investment off someone else, and indeed still get roughly the same share without making the investment. Obviously there is great moral hazard to simply scalp the benefit of children without having to make the investment yourself, and SS is all to happy to provide that. |
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| ▲ | pjc50 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The traditional approach to this is: a) make younger female family members do all the work b) make them invisible, politically and socially, so everything looks fine | | |
| ▲ | bombcar 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Even if you don't go to that extreme, you look back only a few generations and even today at immigrants, and you see that the old people never stop working until they're literally bed-ridden. They might not have GDP-increasing jobs that show up on balance sheets, but grandma watches the kids (effectively working as daycare, off-books), grandpa fixes things, and so on. By demanding everything be reduced to the nuclear family (or smaller) we've created an unnatural situation on never seen before on a global scale. | | |
| ▲ | mothballed 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > They might not have GDP-increasing jobs that show up on balance sheets, but grandma watches the kids (effectively working as daycare, off-books), grandpa fixes things, and so on. Yes I believe this brings up one of the more poisonous elements of social security, even if it is worth it. It completely decouples the mutual assistance where the parent and grandparent form a symbiotic relationship in the interest of raising the child. Instead of a quid-pro-quo, the government violently enforces a one-way transaction and the older generation can simply tell the younger generation to kick rocks. Obviously I don't think the elderly have any responsibility to do daycare or fix things, but the fact they can simply not do so while demanding the counterparty still keep up their end of the bargain -- has consequences. If the older generation can tell the younger generation to kick rocks, then the younger generation ought to be able to tell the older generation they can kick rocks back to whatever private savings/investment they have. | | |
| ▲ | bombcar 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's always been my deep unsettling feeling about the whole idea of "mass-market social security nets" of the type Americans call "social security" - it's one thing to provide for those who literally have nothing and nobody; it's another to blanket everyone with it and disrupt natural processes that are as old as time. Of course, many actual families do NOT go to extremes, and in fact USE the social security they get to help fund the grandchildren, in all sorts of ways. But you have to actively fight against the status quo to do so. It's interesting to note that even though everyone 'knows' you don't pay SS payments into some account somewhere that is drawn from later, it's transfer payments now - it is still marketed and sold as the former. |
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| ▲ | kingofmen 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Forms of retirement that don't have the force of law can be adjusted on the fly to match the available resources. When the government forcibly requires that each elderly person be paid a fixed amount of resources yearly, it's possible for there to be literally zero surplus for the young people making the resources. That can't happen under systems where the transfers are voluntary. | |
| ▲ | ben_w 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I mean, who else going to grow the food and sweep the streets? I'm not sure what the state of the art is with either of these, but I'm now imagining scaled-up Roombas stealthily cleaning the streets at night. Or this, but self-driving: https://www.alamy.com/compact-kubota-bx2350-street-cleaning-... More seriously, I think there is a before-and-after point with AI, before some point the automation is just a "normal technology" and we need humans for a lot of jobs, pensioners can only get meaningful pensions when a new generation is present to pay for it all, otherwise pension ages need to keep rising; after that point, automation is so good we can do UBI (AKA "set the pension age to birth")… well, provided the state owns the automation, otherwise good luck demanding free access. | |
| ▲ | internetter 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | (I am a social democrat, not a libertarian) All models require to some extent the youth working, but not all require a part of the youth's fruits of their labour being taken and put into social security. A libertarian might say that the onus is on the boomers to save enough money to fund their own retirement so that they're not reliant on the social security safety net. | | |
| ▲ | bombcar 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It doesn't really matter on a macro scale if you have social security doing it, or "retirement accounts" doing it - at the base there is capital and value-add (work) and you're transferring from one to the other. Now perhaps 401ks owning stocks is effectively "lending" capital to the working-class for a fee - but you'd have to argue that. | | |
| ▲ | triceratops 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It absolutely does matter whether you're taxing wages or capital though. Wages are constrained by the number of workers. Capital is constrained by total productivity. |
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| ▲ | mindslight 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The point is that money is still just an abstraction. When you take a step back and analyze things in terms of goods and services being the value, you end up with the same types of questions as when analyzing social security in terms of money. |
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