I'll put my testimony behind the claim that teacher training programs are useless. When I started my career as a public school teacher, I could barely believe how much of a disconnect there was between the realities of the job and the content of my courses. It would have made infinitely more sense to skip the classes entirely and just start student teaching with a decent mentor.
I have to wonder just how many jobs this is true for - how much better of a preperation it would be to be hired for a wide range of legitemately specalized jobs out of high school as a know-nothing, and learn on the job.
'Old people' and 'young people' are not different groups of people. It's the same group of people over time. The elderly parasites you despise were once creative young people that were not hired, made useless contribution to social security etc, according to your simplistic view. The current elderly have invented tools (technology, medicine) and maintained peace that makes it possible for the current young to be more productive. It's funny how you simultaneously claim that world is getter better, all the time, but then also, the current young (accustomed to the best tech and medical care in the history of mankind) are screwed, it's so bad!
Meanwhile, "the young" are far from a single group. For starters, there is lot of evidence of increasing political gaps between men and women. Conservatives (whoever they are) are already winning over young men. It is harder than ever to appeal to "the young" as a group.
Clearly, there are some well known and significant economic issues that you raise: wasteful education, housing costs, medicare. Social security is not a big problem and there is not reason for big moves there. It is also not wise, politically or substantively, to make or advocate so many huge policy changes in a society that is already unstable and polarized.
>The elderly parasites you despise were once creative young people that were not hired, made useless contribution to social security etc, according to your simplistic view.
If the policies were instated in the last ~50 years, by definition the existing elderly parasites did NOT suffer the indignity of not being hired in favour of an older person and did NOT contribute to Social Security to the same extent as a present-day young person.
This is simply not reality. The 1986 Social Security reform act under the Reagan administration recognized that the baby boomer generation would overwhelm the current working generations ability to finance it. Prior to this act SS was a pay-as-you-go system in which each generation of workers financed the SS payments to the previous now elderly generation. The 1986 act instituted a much higher tax on the young boomers such that they both financed their grandparents retirements, but also contributed to the SS Trust Fund from which to help finance their own retirements. So, yes, the current retirees have contributed to the same extent as present-day young people.
The problem is largely one of 1) generation size, 2) perception. For the first, nobody at the time (1986) recognized quite how small gen X and the millennial generations would be relative to the boomers. This has obviously created a problem for current generations since there are fewer workers to finance a large retiring cohort. For the 2nd, the Trust Fund was always intended to be a temporary stop gap for a singular problem, but as often happens with temporary legal creations, people started thinking of it as a foundational part of the system. Thus, you read these breathless media descriptions along the lines of "Trust Fund to be bankrupt in 2035!". The reality is that that was how it was intended, but along with the generation size problem it actually does have ramifications that need to be addressed.
You're obviously better acquainted with this topic than I am, but a cursory inspection of the literature makes it look like the percentage of an American adult's income which is earmarked for Social Security has been increasing over time, including a significant increase between 1980 and today. Obviously the income caps aren't inflation-adjusted, but if a thirty-year-old American in 1980 had to pay X% of their income over $Y into Social Security, and a thirty-year-old in 2024 has to pay X+2% of all income over $Z, couldn't that be consistent with the latter person paying more into Social Security over the course of their career than the former person? I don't know if it actually scales that way, I'm asking the question.
Separate from the Social Security question, it seems straightforwardly true that the credentialism and occupational licensing phenomenon has become dramatically progressively worse over time. Even if Joe in 1980 did have to pay the exact same inflation-adjusted percentage of his income as Jim in 2024, Joe was able to start earning real money from a much earlier age than Jim, and wasn't obliged to saddle himself with thousands in student loans in order to qualify for a job which, two generations prior, one would have prepared for with salaried on-the-job training.
That might be true except for the fact that 1980 to 1983, the U.S. had the worst and longest recession since the Depression with deeper unemployment, especially among young people (the boomers) than people faced during the GFC in 2008 - and that's not to mention that inflation over that period was over 12% per year. If Joe in 1980 was one of the lucky few boomers to have a job that paid enough to cover expenses, most of it was being eaten by inflation. You don't have to believe me on this, do a search on unemployment and inflation statistics and you'll see what I'm saying. You'll also see that unemployment didn't dip below 5% until 1997. Despite what people believe now, it wasn't easy getting started in those years.
On credentialism and occupational licensing, though, I'm in complete agreement. It's a sham that along with our inability to build (looking at you NEPA) causes huge amounts of harm to all generations at the present time.
The other problem was that the reforms continued to use the wage tax to collect revenue instead of a consumption tax like the VAT. The mistake was also built into Medicare and unemployment benefits. Transfers on account of life circumstances should be financed with a VAT.
Interesting view on important problems Richard, thanks.
I think including the time dimension in your analysis will be revealing. That is, most youth do make it to older age, and there the difference in outcomes between rich families and poor families are so huge that ignoring this is a serious gap, I think. For those who have the "merit" of being born in families with some wealth, inheritance means all this tax on the young will eventually get compensated by receiving the wealth of their elders. For those whose who don't have that merit, it's a just a tax that gets repeated every generation.
Therefore what looks like a transfer from the young to the old when frozen in time, is effectively a transfer from poor families to rich families, when considering time.
It would be easy to remove this driver of gerontocracy by just taxing inheritance at least much as work is taxed - but that would be against the interests of ALL lawmakers' children, so is highly unlikely to get done without popular pressure.
If you are looking for incoherence in the professed belief in meritocracy of both left and right, inheritance taxation, or lack thereof, is where it's most glaring. With a threshold of 1 M$ per child before a punitive marginal tax rate kicks in, and get 99.99% of the voters behind it. But don't expect lawmakers to take that initiative.
Interesting take but it seems like the middle class would be suffering more from gerontocracy then the poor since they pay more taxes and are the ones going to college and such.
Keep in mind though that much of the transfer occurs more through real-estate and the various mechanisms described in Richard's article. So if you're middle class and suffer from skyrocketing rents, this will get compensated when you inherit a home (on average), but not if you don't have this merit.
Yeah that is true but I guess the crux of Richards post is that the young are disadvantaged and that even though they will also be old in the future and get the advantages described in this post these advantages come at the wrong time. So everyone basically gets screwed over since resources are received at the wrong time. Hanania probably thought of this meme while writing.
The wealth gap is almost purely racial. Whites and Asians become educated, get high paying jobs, and save money. Blacks and Hispanics don't as often. You're in effect accusing Whites and Asians of stealing their wealth from the downtrodden victims of society, defending zero sum economics, on the basis of the existence of disparate outcomes.
We had a six figure inheritance tax under Clinton, and a $1m inheritance tax under Bush's first term. I don't see how increasing the cap under Obama and Trump to the several to 10+ million range really changes anything except the annual budget by maybe a few billion here or there. As long as we have an income tax and a lot of spending to cover, I think having an inheritance tax with a fairly generous exemption makes sense, but I don't understand your justification at all.
Worth noting that not all families are as generous to their children; sometimes families hate each other and people get snubbed from inheritance altogether. It's a similar story to FAFSA, how middle/high-earning parents can screw their children out of ever getting financial aid, refusing to support their tuitions, while simultaneously declaring their children as dependents for tax purposes. Any government system based on the assumption of the generosity of the old is a non-starter.
This is exactly what my parents did. They are both high-earners (top 20-10% depending on period) but refused any kind of financial commitment for my studies.
They even got tax adjustment because of course they were lying to the government about me being at their charge.
Now I work the least amount possible so I don’t have to pay for their retirement with the absurdly high taxation on work (I’m in France).
Some people seem to think parents are inherently good, they are very wrong.
This article makes it sound like all of these problems are somehow due to the "gerontocracy", but in reality they are the sum of many bad decisions made by politicians, especially the left. While it is fine to suggest changes to policy, this article is very glib, IMO, about "well if we just do this" we can fix it.
Personally, given how woke the younger generations are, and without ANY Judeo-Christian guidance apparently, I would not give much hope for my chances when (if) I reach my 70's or 80's and they make the laws.
> The ban on age discrimination against old people has been particularly disastrous in the tech industry, where the young naturally tend to be better at learning new things.
> Young people are the last hired, and often the first to be let go.
This does not agree with any discussion of the tech industry that I've ever seen. It is generally acknowledged to apply some of the strongest age discrimination it's possible to find in the wild. Young people are hired first, and often exclusively.
For the ban on age discrimination to have had particularly disastrous effects in the tech industry, there would have to be truly incredible gains to be achieved from the tiny sliver of possibility space between the colossal amount of age discrimination already practiced by the industry, and the amount that counterfactually would be practiced in the absence of the ban. But there's a limit to how much age discrimination it's possible to practice; where would these gains be coming from?
Those tech jobs you refer to are scarce and select for the top talent around the world. Do you seriously think it's age discrimination when Google hires a 28 year old PhD in computer engineering for a cutting-edge AI research job, vs the 58 year old with a BS in electrical engineering who has been doing nothing but routine circuit design for 30 years?
You're also ignoring the other part of the equation, which is firing. If a 60 year old is far past his prime and unable to learn new skills, all the while collecting a hefty salary due to seniority, the economical and fair thing to do would be to fire him and replace him with someone much younger and cheaper, but if doing so incurs the risk of a seven figure DoJ-backed lawsuit, it's better to just keep him on board, to the detriment of the young.
“Young people are the last hired, and often the first to be let go.”
Tell that to the 50 somethings let go just short of full retirement.
The problem with this kind of oversimplified and over- generalized argument, of which this article is full, is that it feeds on jealousy and envy rather than a sober study of facts and historical data.
Pitting the old against the young is a Marxist idea which is extremely bad for society. It’s dehumanizing & ignores the benefits all human beings bring to the table.
You need to also address the fact that cutting these benefits will lead to some of these costs shifting to other family members. The children and family members already drain their savings and time acting as caregivers to their loved ones, so taking away these resources will indirectly also drain the younger population you are wanting to help. But you did make some good points about housing, credentialism, and supporting young families
I was searching for some approach which can connect the dots of different developments and what is the missing answer to all of them. Things like
- The weird thing about Covid weren't masks or vaccines but the fact that all the measures were still made after it was known it mostly hit old people in nursery homes. It's a weird strategy for a society to protect the unproductive old by locking down the youth
- Why is the precautionary principle so dominant, especially in Europe?
- Why are the populist movements mostly in favor of recreating the past 2-3 decades ago but not for a radical growth strategy?
Thank you, it really does make sense that a missing focus on youth is basically the same as a missing sense for the future. To come back to the future we need to empower a focus on youth
They put SICK people back into nursing homes instead of keeping them in hospitals, thereby exposing more susceptible people to COVID infections and killing them disproportionately to the population. You’re theory doesn’t work.
I like these ideas in isolation but I think it’s going to be hard to turn them into functional policy. Social Security was intended to subtract old people from the workforce. If you cut it you’re going to encourage old people to stay in the workforce. But then if you kick them out through age discrimination they are going to need more assets, such as expensive houses that they can sell to live on. This goes against the goal of providing cheaper housing for young people to raise families in. And so on.
It is not the age, but rather the ideas that underpin the mental lives of those in positions of authority or trust which matter. Wisdom takes decades of experience to achieve and not many do. In rackets (don't call them systems) like those which are now crumbling before our eyes, falsehood, not wisdom, has proven to deliver results to those vain, untalented, incompetents who can't make it on merit. Even they have to survive somehow, usually by taking from others what they can't make themselves. Reward merit, founded upon truth -- in short, get better ideas -- and all boats are lifted, except those who have nothing but bravado and purported victimhood status. They will sink. In fact, their edifice is collapsing right now.
I'll never forget that. My first house I thought I was lucky in that I could assume 70% of the loan at 12.5%, financed the rest as a 2nd mortgage at 18.5%. Talk about house poor.
I'm 66 and using my social security statement I was able to calculate what I paid in over the years and what my payments would be worth now and invested them in the S&P 500. I then calculated the value of my benefits using the Social Security actuarial life tables to adjust them
The results are
Value of my social security if invested $1.45 million
Actuarial value of my benefits $0.95 million ($950,000)
Thus I lost about a third of the value. Obviously this includes intra generational transfers as well as transfer to my parent's and grandparent's generation. However, this does not calculate what my net return from Medicare will be. Given the $500,000 difference and the significant Medicare taxes that I paid earlier in my life I don't think it will make up for the $500,000 gap.
On your other points I agree. We need to build more houses (I would sacrifice a large portion of my housing wealth for that) and education is ridiculous and corrupt.
But something I didn't really see directly addressed: people like to preserve the idea of retirement as something to look forward to; the promise that someday this drudgery will be over. That's why the French youth riot. Even though "drudgery" for them includes 6 weeks of vacation and half-assing their jobs the other 46 weeks, even then, people don't want to let go of the ability to daydream about being free of it. Like the guy who buys a single lotto ticket each week just to maintain the ability to daydream.
I imagine a lot of people would be inclined to accept somewhat more drudgery during their working years if it means being able to keep the dream of their golden years alive.
Moreover, the average person also knows that if left to save for his own retirement, even if given somewhat more money than the net present value of his expected retirement benefits, he wouldn't end up with nearly enough money to retire. He would presumably blame someone else and not his lack of frugality and self-control, but regardless, his prediction of the future would be correct.
I gained new despair for the average person's ability to save when I learned that a majority of people who have traditional IRAs (surely an indication of being middle class and giving a reasonable amount of thought to the future) will at some point in their lives pull funds out of those IRAs, with full penalties.
Maybe not an insurmountable problem, but that's what we're discussing: taking away the ability to daydream about retirement from the median voter.
If the young had more money, they'd just blow it. Better for the olds to hang onto it until the kids mature into prudent, productive adults. IOW, let nature take its course.
"Millions of Americans nearing their golden years are still financially unprepared for retirement. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, 50% of women and 47% of men between the ages of 55 and 66 have no retirement savings."
I'll put my testimony behind the claim that teacher training programs are useless. When I started my career as a public school teacher, I could barely believe how much of a disconnect there was between the realities of the job and the content of my courses. It would have made infinitely more sense to skip the classes entirely and just start student teaching with a decent mentor.
I have to wonder just how many jobs this is true for - how much better of a preperation it would be to be hired for a wide range of legitemately specalized jobs out of high school as a know-nothing, and learn on the job.
It is not so far from the truth for law in fact, even though one does need a body of knowledge
I cannot tell you how many teachers have told me the same thing.
'Old people' and 'young people' are not different groups of people. It's the same group of people over time. The elderly parasites you despise were once creative young people that were not hired, made useless contribution to social security etc, according to your simplistic view. The current elderly have invented tools (technology, medicine) and maintained peace that makes it possible for the current young to be more productive. It's funny how you simultaneously claim that world is getter better, all the time, but then also, the current young (accustomed to the best tech and medical care in the history of mankind) are screwed, it's so bad!
Meanwhile, "the young" are far from a single group. For starters, there is lot of evidence of increasing political gaps between men and women. Conservatives (whoever they are) are already winning over young men. It is harder than ever to appeal to "the young" as a group.
Clearly, there are some well known and significant economic issues that you raise: wasteful education, housing costs, medicare. Social security is not a big problem and there is not reason for big moves there. It is also not wise, politically or substantively, to make or advocate so many huge policy changes in a society that is already unstable and polarized.
>The elderly parasites you despise were once creative young people that were not hired, made useless contribution to social security etc, according to your simplistic view.
If the policies were instated in the last ~50 years, by definition the existing elderly parasites did NOT suffer the indignity of not being hired in favour of an older person and did NOT contribute to Social Security to the same extent as a present-day young person.
This is simply not reality. The 1986 Social Security reform act under the Reagan administration recognized that the baby boomer generation would overwhelm the current working generations ability to finance it. Prior to this act SS was a pay-as-you-go system in which each generation of workers financed the SS payments to the previous now elderly generation. The 1986 act instituted a much higher tax on the young boomers such that they both financed their grandparents retirements, but also contributed to the SS Trust Fund from which to help finance their own retirements. So, yes, the current retirees have contributed to the same extent as present-day young people.
The problem is largely one of 1) generation size, 2) perception. For the first, nobody at the time (1986) recognized quite how small gen X and the millennial generations would be relative to the boomers. This has obviously created a problem for current generations since there are fewer workers to finance a large retiring cohort. For the 2nd, the Trust Fund was always intended to be a temporary stop gap for a singular problem, but as often happens with temporary legal creations, people started thinking of it as a foundational part of the system. Thus, you read these breathless media descriptions along the lines of "Trust Fund to be bankrupt in 2035!". The reality is that that was how it was intended, but along with the generation size problem it actually does have ramifications that need to be addressed.
You're obviously better acquainted with this topic than I am, but a cursory inspection of the literature makes it look like the percentage of an American adult's income which is earmarked for Social Security has been increasing over time, including a significant increase between 1980 and today. Obviously the income caps aren't inflation-adjusted, but if a thirty-year-old American in 1980 had to pay X% of their income over $Y into Social Security, and a thirty-year-old in 2024 has to pay X+2% of all income over $Z, couldn't that be consistent with the latter person paying more into Social Security over the course of their career than the former person? I don't know if it actually scales that way, I'm asking the question.
Separate from the Social Security question, it seems straightforwardly true that the credentialism and occupational licensing phenomenon has become dramatically progressively worse over time. Even if Joe in 1980 did have to pay the exact same inflation-adjusted percentage of his income as Jim in 2024, Joe was able to start earning real money from a much earlier age than Jim, and wasn't obliged to saddle himself with thousands in student loans in order to qualify for a job which, two generations prior, one would have prepared for with salaried on-the-job training.
That might be true except for the fact that 1980 to 1983, the U.S. had the worst and longest recession since the Depression with deeper unemployment, especially among young people (the boomers) than people faced during the GFC in 2008 - and that's not to mention that inflation over that period was over 12% per year. If Joe in 1980 was one of the lucky few boomers to have a job that paid enough to cover expenses, most of it was being eaten by inflation. You don't have to believe me on this, do a search on unemployment and inflation statistics and you'll see what I'm saying. You'll also see that unemployment didn't dip below 5% until 1997. Despite what people believe now, it wasn't easy getting started in those years.
On credentialism and occupational licensing, though, I'm in complete agreement. It's a sham that along with our inability to build (looking at you NEPA) causes huge amounts of harm to all generations at the present time.
Don’t forget those 21% mortgage rates!
I just replied to you a level above.
The other problem was that the reforms continued to use the wage tax to collect revenue instead of a consumption tax like the VAT. The mistake was also built into Medicare and unemployment benefits. Transfers on account of life circumstances should be financed with a VAT.
Well said. Credentialism and house price inflation are incredibly moronic and are barely challenged or even recognised in the mainstream.
Interesting view on important problems Richard, thanks.
I think including the time dimension in your analysis will be revealing. That is, most youth do make it to older age, and there the difference in outcomes between rich families and poor families are so huge that ignoring this is a serious gap, I think. For those who have the "merit" of being born in families with some wealth, inheritance means all this tax on the young will eventually get compensated by receiving the wealth of their elders. For those whose who don't have that merit, it's a just a tax that gets repeated every generation.
Therefore what looks like a transfer from the young to the old when frozen in time, is effectively a transfer from poor families to rich families, when considering time.
It would be easy to remove this driver of gerontocracy by just taxing inheritance at least much as work is taxed - but that would be against the interests of ALL lawmakers' children, so is highly unlikely to get done without popular pressure.
If you are looking for incoherence in the professed belief in meritocracy of both left and right, inheritance taxation, or lack thereof, is where it's most glaring. With a threshold of 1 M$ per child before a punitive marginal tax rate kicks in, and get 99.99% of the voters behind it. But don't expect lawmakers to take that initiative.
One report on how an increasing number of freshly minted billionaires are not self-made (Financial Times):
https://www.ft.com/content/3944234e-e3b4-46fa-8c2f-cadec780ecb4
Interesting take but it seems like the middle class would be suffering more from gerontocracy then the poor since they pay more taxes and are the ones going to college and such.
Good point on middle-class taxes.
Keep in mind though that much of the transfer occurs more through real-estate and the various mechanisms described in Richard's article. So if you're middle class and suffer from skyrocketing rents, this will get compensated when you inherit a home (on average), but not if you don't have this merit.
Yeah that is true but I guess the crux of Richards post is that the young are disadvantaged and that even though they will also be old in the future and get the advantages described in this post these advantages come at the wrong time. So everyone basically gets screwed over since resources are received at the wrong time. Hanania probably thought of this meme while writing.
https://br.ifunny.co/picture/time-energy-and-money-never-come-to-you-all-together-3YbtHUnH9
hah! love that meme. The Heisenberg inequality of our lives...
Right, everyone loses from this.
The wealth gap is almost purely racial. Whites and Asians become educated, get high paying jobs, and save money. Blacks and Hispanics don't as often. You're in effect accusing Whites and Asians of stealing their wealth from the downtrodden victims of society, defending zero sum economics, on the basis of the existence of disparate outcomes.
We had a six figure inheritance tax under Clinton, and a $1m inheritance tax under Bush's first term. I don't see how increasing the cap under Obama and Trump to the several to 10+ million range really changes anything except the annual budget by maybe a few billion here or there. As long as we have an income tax and a lot of spending to cover, I think having an inheritance tax with a fairly generous exemption makes sense, but I don't understand your justification at all.
Worth noting that not all families are as generous to their children; sometimes families hate each other and people get snubbed from inheritance altogether. It's a similar story to FAFSA, how middle/high-earning parents can screw their children out of ever getting financial aid, refusing to support their tuitions, while simultaneously declaring their children as dependents for tax purposes. Any government system based on the assumption of the generosity of the old is a non-starter.
This is exactly what my parents did. They are both high-earners (top 20-10% depending on period) but refused any kind of financial commitment for my studies.
They even got tax adjustment because of course they were lying to the government about me being at their charge.
Now I work the least amount possible so I don’t have to pay for their retirement with the absurdly high taxation on work (I’m in France).
Some people seem to think parents are inherently good, they are very wrong.
This article makes it sound like all of these problems are somehow due to the "gerontocracy", but in reality they are the sum of many bad decisions made by politicians, especially the left. While it is fine to suggest changes to policy, this article is very glib, IMO, about "well if we just do this" we can fix it.
Personally, given how woke the younger generations are, and without ANY Judeo-Christian guidance apparently, I would not give much hope for my chances when (if) I reach my 70's or 80's and they make the laws.
> The ban on age discrimination against old people has been particularly disastrous in the tech industry, where the young naturally tend to be better at learning new things.
> Young people are the last hired, and often the first to be let go.
This does not agree with any discussion of the tech industry that I've ever seen. It is generally acknowledged to apply some of the strongest age discrimination it's possible to find in the wild. Young people are hired first, and often exclusively.
For the ban on age discrimination to have had particularly disastrous effects in the tech industry, there would have to be truly incredible gains to be achieved from the tiny sliver of possibility space between the colossal amount of age discrimination already practiced by the industry, and the amount that counterfactually would be practiced in the absence of the ban. But there's a limit to how much age discrimination it's possible to practice; where would these gains be coming from?
Those tech jobs you refer to are scarce and select for the top talent around the world. Do you seriously think it's age discrimination when Google hires a 28 year old PhD in computer engineering for a cutting-edge AI research job, vs the 58 year old with a BS in electrical engineering who has been doing nothing but routine circuit design for 30 years?
You're also ignoring the other part of the equation, which is firing. If a 60 year old is far past his prime and unable to learn new skills, all the while collecting a hefty salary due to seniority, the economical and fair thing to do would be to fire him and replace him with someone much younger and cheaper, but if doing so incurs the risk of a seven figure DoJ-backed lawsuit, it's better to just keep him on board, to the detriment of the young.
“Young people are the last hired, and often the first to be let go.”
Tell that to the 50 somethings let go just short of full retirement.
The problem with this kind of oversimplified and over- generalized argument, of which this article is full, is that it feeds on jealousy and envy rather than a sober study of facts and historical data.
Pitting the old against the young is a Marxist idea which is extremely bad for society. It’s dehumanizing & ignores the benefits all human beings bring to the table.
Hanania’s best article yet
You need to also address the fact that cutting these benefits will lead to some of these costs shifting to other family members. The children and family members already drain their savings and time acting as caregivers to their loved ones, so taking away these resources will indirectly also drain the younger population you are wanting to help. But you did make some good points about housing, credentialism, and supporting young families
This is it!
I was searching for some approach which can connect the dots of different developments and what is the missing answer to all of them. Things like
- The weird thing about Covid weren't masks or vaccines but the fact that all the measures were still made after it was known it mostly hit old people in nursery homes. It's a weird strategy for a society to protect the unproductive old by locking down the youth
- Why is the precautionary principle so dominant, especially in Europe?
- Why are the populist movements mostly in favor of recreating the past 2-3 decades ago but not for a radical growth strategy?
Thank you, it really does make sense that a missing focus on youth is basically the same as a missing sense for the future. To come back to the future we need to empower a focus on youth
They put SICK people back into nursing homes instead of keeping them in hospitals, thereby exposing more susceptible people to COVID infections and killing them disproportionately to the population. You’re theory doesn’t work.
https://open.substack.com/pub/debbielerman/p/the-national-security-arms-of-government?r=1yhvat&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
I like these ideas in isolation but I think it’s going to be hard to turn them into functional policy. Social Security was intended to subtract old people from the workforce. If you cut it you’re going to encourage old people to stay in the workforce. But then if you kick them out through age discrimination they are going to need more assets, such as expensive houses that they can sell to live on. This goes against the goal of providing cheaper housing for young people to raise families in. And so on.
It is not the age, but rather the ideas that underpin the mental lives of those in positions of authority or trust which matter. Wisdom takes decades of experience to achieve and not many do. In rackets (don't call them systems) like those which are now crumbling before our eyes, falsehood, not wisdom, has proven to deliver results to those vain, untalented, incompetents who can't make it on merit. Even they have to survive somehow, usually by taking from others what they can't make themselves. Reward merit, founded upon truth -- in short, get better ideas -- and all boats are lifted, except those who have nothing but bravado and purported victimhood status. They will sink. In fact, their edifice is collapsing right now.
I'll never forget that. My first house I thought I was lucky in that I could assume 70% of the loan at 12.5%, financed the rest as a 2nd mortgage at 18.5%. Talk about house poor.
I think all of this is ignoring the point that people generally feel bad for older citizens because they're, y'know, old.
I'm 66 and using my social security statement I was able to calculate what I paid in over the years and what my payments would be worth now and invested them in the S&P 500. I then calculated the value of my benefits using the Social Security actuarial life tables to adjust them
The results are
Value of my social security if invested $1.45 million
Actuarial value of my benefits $0.95 million ($950,000)
Thus I lost about a third of the value. Obviously this includes intra generational transfers as well as transfer to my parent's and grandparent's generation. However, this does not calculate what my net return from Medicare will be. Given the $500,000 difference and the significant Medicare taxes that I paid earlier in my life I don't think it will make up for the $500,000 gap.
On your other points I agree. We need to build more houses (I would sacrifice a large portion of my housing wealth for that) and education is ridiculous and corrupt.
Good remarks, especially about credentialism.
But something I didn't really see directly addressed: people like to preserve the idea of retirement as something to look forward to; the promise that someday this drudgery will be over. That's why the French youth riot. Even though "drudgery" for them includes 6 weeks of vacation and half-assing their jobs the other 46 weeks, even then, people don't want to let go of the ability to daydream about being free of it. Like the guy who buys a single lotto ticket each week just to maintain the ability to daydream.
I imagine a lot of people would be inclined to accept somewhat more drudgery during their working years if it means being able to keep the dream of their golden years alive.
Moreover, the average person also knows that if left to save for his own retirement, even if given somewhat more money than the net present value of his expected retirement benefits, he wouldn't end up with nearly enough money to retire. He would presumably blame someone else and not his lack of frugality and self-control, but regardless, his prediction of the future would be correct.
I gained new despair for the average person's ability to save when I learned that a majority of people who have traditional IRAs (surely an indication of being middle class and giving a reasonable amount of thought to the future) will at some point in their lives pull funds out of those IRAs, with full penalties.
Maybe not an insurmountable problem, but that's what we're discussing: taking away the ability to daydream about retirement from the median voter.
If the young had more money, they'd just blow it. Better for the olds to hang onto it until the kids mature into prudent, productive adults. IOW, let nature take its course.
"Millions of Americans nearing their golden years are still financially unprepared for retirement. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, 50% of women and 47% of men between the ages of 55 and 66 have no retirement savings."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millions-of-americans-nearing-retirement-age-no-savings/
Ok boomer
See Aesop's "The Ant and the Grasshopper" for guidance.