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.
Social Security will be solvent over the next 75 years, but 16% of the gap between spending and revenue remains in the 75th year, meaning the program is not yet sustainable.
YOUR POLICY SELECTIONS
% OF GAP CLOSED
Slow Benefit Growth for Top 20% Of Earners
11%
Limit Spousal Benefits for High Earners
3%
Create Minimum Benefit at 125% of Poverty
-3%
Means-Test Benefits for Higher Earners
16%
Tax All Wages Above $400,000
67%
Apply the Payroll Tax to "Cafeteria Plans"
10%
TOTAL
104%
Oh, this is so incredibly coordinated to what I was doing just a minute ago, which is checking one of my Pension funds and realizing it recovered from a massive hit back in March. I was thinking about how futile the whole thing is... I just know this money will never be mine, and I will work until I die (if I'm lucky enough). Oh well, I guess better get some sleep, back to the office tomorrow...
For the last 10-odd years I've been putting money away / aside, making regular small contributions to investments for retirement, such that I think I'm somewhat ahead of my age cohort.
And yet, the more I look at it, the more I get the feeling that I might still have to get lucky to be able to retire at retirement age.
I would look at the real value of the dollar before assuming the real value of it went up. With how bad [actual] inflation is/will be, it wouldn’t be surprising if your pension actually dropped in real value.
I'm very skeptical of this. It smacks of burning half your crops so the price of the remainder gets bid up.
We can also examine it by pushing it further. What if the mandatory retirement age was 30? The wages for those under 30 will be higher because of supply and demand, but they'd also have to support all those people over 30 who are not contributing anything to the economy.
In the net, early retirement will lower the standard of living of those still in the workplace.
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.
> 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.
If one accepts this hypothesis, then raising the retirement age is good for all previously-working people, as they now have less people to support and more workers providing that support...
Taken to its logical conclusion one could even argue that ending government backed retirement pensions entirely and letting people make their own decisions is the best idea.
Some people might plan to work until the day they drop, which is obviously a laudable goal. It's good to contribute to the economy.
Others may purchase an annuity for a target date years or decades in the future, which pay out in basically the same way as social security tends to.
Some (maybe most) would just save more for retirement, because they know if they don't no one will.
Realistically I suspect most people would hedge their bets dynamically go for a combination of these things. Which isn't all that different from the current system, where SS despite being over 20% of the federal budget is considered by most to be woefully inadequate even in the current day for a retirement plan.
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.
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.
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.
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'll probably let the generation that created this mess retire like normal, and instead try to fix it by making their children and grandchildren work until death.
It will probably have to look something like western Europe with massive across the board tax increases. I make $60k a year in the USA and my tax rates are about 12%, with no VAT. They'd probably need to look more like France, where a $60k income is hit with a 42% effective tax (adjusted for progressive rates) before 20% VAT is paid at the store.
vat is simply corporate income tax, it's a tax on "value added", i.e. profit or income. I don't know in europe whether that is on top of other corporate income tax or not.
Companies can just raise prices without consequences? Is that free market competition in action?
Snark aside. I've always heard the idea was that free markets and competition would drive down prices, and that if a company was to just raise their prices, they would actually lose money because people would buy from a competitor with better prices. Turns out companies can just raise prices though. What does it mean when the things that happen in a healthy free market aren't happening?
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 Democrats seem to have no appetite for it either. )
In the past, Republicans would cut taxes ( popular ) while not spending as much ( unpopular ). Democrats would not cut taxes ( unpopular ) while spending more ( popular ).
Sadly, today both parties are acting like undisciplined parents. Everybody wants to give out the treats ( spend big ) while nobody wants to earn the paycheck ( raise the taxes ). It’s a bipartisan formula for disaster.
> 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 stupid, because the poor have nothing more to give. Even if we could extract 10x the amount of taxes from the poor, it would barely be a blip. If the bottom 50% paid 10x the taxes, then they'd be contributing, what, like 15% of all taxes? We're going to take from the poor, take food out of their mouths, for 15% more taxes? Like I said before, its like trying to squeeze blood from a stone, there's just nothing there to squeeze.
>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
Instead of taxing income or spending, tax wealth. Will the wealthy make themselves less wealthy in order to avoid a wealth tax? I don't think so. Tax the top 1%; even with a wealth tax they'll still be able to afford multiple homes and a yacht--hell, there are people who can afford two homes and a yacht and don't even fall in the top 1%, so people will still be able to have plenty without ever actually paying a wealth tax.
There are some theoretical advantages to a wealth tax but in practice it would be extremely difficult to implement. The issue is that much wealth isn't cash in a bank account or holdings of publicly traded securities but rather equity in illiquid private investments. And some of that is offshore, so would you only tax wealth held in the USA by American citizens or would it apply more broadly?
Like one person I know is a German citizen living and working in the USA with a permanent resident visa, and she owns some forestry land in Canada. Should that land be subject to a wealth tax and if so how would you value it? Does the IRS then need to hire an army of bureaucrats to calculate valuations on those assets?
the stock market returns on average 7%. a 50% tax on on income means the stock market effectively returns 3.5%
a wealth tax of 1% reduces the return on the stock market for that year to 6%, but it compounds onto follow-on years; if you "wealth tax" every year, that effectively lowers the return on the market very dramatically. If the returns on the stock market are lowered dramatically, you will see a huge slowdown in the economy.
the point of this is, there isn't really such a thing as a "wealth tax", it's just a "multiplied income tax". it might be different in your head, but you're wrong, it's not different in reality. you are welcome for the free education.
the question is, why is the only thing you can think of "take money from people who have it". that's a zero sum game, no wealth creation. What makes market economies so wonderful to live in is their wealth creation.
Why does Elon have so much money? wealth creation. Here's why: without Tesla, the roads would not be empty of cars, people would just buy different cars. There are other car companies, GM, Ford, Nissan, Honda, Volkswagen, etc.
Tesla is not taking your money. Tesla is offering an alternative car to buy with your money. With no Tesla, you would plunk your money down on one of those other brands, but if you like Tesla's better, you buy one of those. That creates happiness, you are happier spending your money on a Tesla than on the alternatives. That's the money that Elon is collecting, GM's money and some extra for your excitement/satisfaction. And he deserves it because he created it and you are happy that he did. You would not be richer without Tesla. You would buy a different brand, and be out the same amount of money, and enjoy your car less. So when you think "we need to take Elon's money" you are essentially saying "I wish Elon didn't exist and I want the crappy Nissan for less money". That's a spiral into the ground because the other company's don't put as much value into their cars as Tesla and if you paid them less, they'd produce less.
If your response to this is "I would never buy a Tesla, I don't even like them", then I will just shake my head sadly at your inability to learn even more.
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.
QSBS is capped, and the SALT deduction goes away with increasing MAGI. They're targeted at the upper middle class, not the wealthy.
The "S" in QSBS stands for "Small" business.
The previous limits were fixed, and this change seems to be adjusting it for inflation. It's been around since 1993. An inflation adjustment is not a "cut".
Even so, as I'm sure you're aware, these two items are not what people mean by "tax cuts for the wealthy". If you ask anyone (other than a tax accountant) what a QSBS deduction is, you'll get a blank stare.
QSBS is only capped for sweat equity. My Series A lead gets a $200m exclusion. With the new $75m asset limit, the Series B lead will probably triple that.
Things like QSBS and carried interest are absolutely part of what people mean by "tax cuts for the wealthy".
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.
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...
I live in a rural community filled with farmers and FiFo workers (fly in | fly out mine and rig workers) with a median age of ~ 60 years.
My father has worked hard manual labour his entire life, he only recently stopped splitting wood and climbing ladders. He was born in 1935.
He's not unusual here, many 60 and 70 year olds, 80 year olds even, are still active on the land here.
Rephrased, it's just as problematic, albeit with a kernel of truthiness:
Clearly some of us are still fully capable of doing manual labour at 67 but those who have spent their lives doing software "engineering" have usually accumulated some significant mental burn out by that age. They need a break.
You see those who have survived the job, not those who don’t. Have you ever asked your father about people he’s worked with who are now dead? Probably a whole lot of em.
> You see those who have survived the job, not those who don’t.
Quite an assumption on your part.
Despite having serious mathematical qualifications and several million SLOC of code behind me, I've also worked cattle stations, mine sites, and been part of SES and St. John's Ambulance crews (first responders to accidents).
That said, to address your question,
he's not worked with either Aaron Swartz nor Terry Davis.
It's not just the age at which the government lets you claim OASDI and Medicare. It's also the fact that in the US at least, we've basically set up the entire economy around the idea of paying retirement/pension funds first and foremost, C-suites second, and the people creating the actual value third.
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.
Ah yes, the mental anguish of knowing you'll never retire because you'll either die before retirement age or they'll just keep pushing it up, so that you do.
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 you were starting to pull out benefits."
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.
We have a way to measure this, it's called the Gini Coefficient, and it spiked in the 80's under deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy. Since then, it's been out of whack with Western norms and now more closely resembles Latin American wealth distribution.
It would be nice if you shared some extensive numbers to quantify that before I take your word for it. Like total government tax revenue vs upper-percentile incomes and upper-percentile incomes vs actual realized income tax percentages. Like, "here is what the median person making 5M in 1955 paid as an effective rate, this is how many of those people there were as a percentage of the population" and the equivalents for the inflation-adjusted people today. Let's look at some of those deductions too - did a 90% top marginal rate in the 40s cause people to make societally useful donations to get deductions? That could still be very beneficial compared to buying bigger yachts.
Top-end compensation has gone through the roof compared to "regular" worker compensation since we started cutting tax rates on the rich. And we also have no shortage of deductions and shelters today either.
So why shouldn't we raise the rates back to at least reduce the consolidation and government revenue trends that have happened since we lowered them?
Here's one quick source that 5 seconds on Google turned up - https://city-countyobserver.com/did-people-really-pay-91-tax... - estimates suggest that top earners in the 50s payed a 42-45% effective tax rate vs today's 26-28% effective tax rate. That's a pretty giant difference! Interestingly, despite that, the top 1% paid a bit smaller of a fraction of total tax income (30-35% vs 40% today) suggesting that it may have helped spread the money around so that the 2-5%, 5-15%, etc parts of the population were relatively better off compared to the top 1%. Less of the top 1% hitting the top marginal rate suggests that it's a rather useful incentive for keeping your salaries less obscene.
While Israel didn't build the next "Intel", it built the next Cisco (Palo Alto Networks), Symantec (Wiz), Akamai, and it's own "Intel" (Tower Semiconductors), and Israeli VC has absolutely cornered the Enterprise SaaS and cybersecurity industry.
Yet, concentrating on business creation seems to ignore the fact that high value industries like much of tech just don't generate that much employment.
The high-tech sector only represents a little over 11% of overall employment in Israel [0]
Median gross salary is around $2800/mo [1] yet tech salaries are around $10,000/mo [2]
While the tech industry is extremely prominent in Israel, it isn't a major employment generator. Most Israelis don't work in tech and are impacted by extremely high CoL - Israel has some of the highest cost of living among OECD countries [3]
This article posits that additional industrial policy can help rebuild large employment industries. While I am strongly in favor of industrial policy, most high value industries are high value EXPLICITLY because they are heavily automated or have low headcount requirements.
Industrial policy for the sake of generating employment simply doesn't work when high value jobs have significant barriers to entry (no, not everyone can code and not everyone can synthesize biopharmaceuticals).
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.
- 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 wealthiest countries on earth can't afford to let people who are 60 years old retire. Other than of course the wealthy would have to pay slightly more in taxes.
I can't find it now but I saw an article talking about all the social and policy ideas that unwittingly got tested in the Covid pandemic. The effects of giving money to poor people (it's not the moral hazard it's made out to be), how schools increase the spread of disease and a whole host of others.
> 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, means that an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars in tax go uncollected every year in the United States alone [1]. Imagine what the federal deficit looks like if the US had to borrow a few hundred billion less each year. It's far from zero, but it's better than it looks now.
Retirement isn't a right, it's a math problem. For most of human history, if you lived long enough to get too old to do labor, you were expected to do something (usually helping with childrearing or teaching skills to younger generations) in order to lessen the burden of your existence to others, mainly your family. Now that most labor isn't actually physical and people are living longer, there's less excuse for doing nothing for 10+ years off of savings besides just wanting to. Unfortunately, given the size of deficits in lots of Western nations and the stagnating wages of the younger generations, those retirement accounts are becoming more attractive as a way to pay off debt that the people holding those accounts created.
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.
Partially went to rich peoples yachts and space programs, partially impacted by an aging population/declining birth rates, and partially went to the fact people consume more stuff and live longer.
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 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.
Many of these people have done physically demanding but completely necessary jobs their entire lives. Their bodies can be wrecked.
I don't know your circumstances but generally speaking I see a lot of "tech-hubris" on HN. People who skew younger and are very privileged to work in tech. The hubris part is being young, many think this will go on forever. The reality is ageism is rampant in tech. The other part is thinking you won't be impacted by automation (and AI).
Will you be bagging groceries until you're 67-69 because Amazon made an AI that now does your job?
> 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.
> 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.
Certainly not all 60 year olds, but plenty of 60 year olds are still actively working in trades. There is a massive gap between, say, doing the building and installing of carpentry related things, and being a grocery store greeter.
It not unreasonable for people to take on a more teaching side of their job and doing much less of the heavy lifting parts. Being in a position to pass on knowledge and technique to the next generation is probably the best things for society and even for many of the individuals as a sense of purpose. The majority of the people I know around me don't know what to do with themselves when they aren't working, so still having something to do isn't a bad thing to them. They just don't want to keep working 40 hours a week to live paycheck to paycheck.
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.
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.
“Savings” are just an abstraction - people can’t literally live off their savings - they trade their savings for labour, and the system is rigged so that those doing the labour have disproportionately little power to set the exchange rate, and the value of savings get juiced to benefit those holding them.
We could shuffle some numbers around with fiscal, monetary and labour policies in ways that would result in far more wealth flowing from the old to the young, rather than from the young to the old as is happening now, and it would still be true that “people earned their savings and can spend it how they see fit”.
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.
Because due to the current brain dead policies of the GOP in the US, life expectancies in the US are falling.
So instead of storing up Social Security by making the ultra rich pay their fair share, people who do real work to enrich these people will have to work longer. That means they will have a shorter and less healthy retirement.
Now, I am guessing about 40% of people in the US will never be able to retire. I know a couple in that situation right now.
The GOP has been trying to kill of Social Security for almost 50 years, I fully expect they will succeed in 10 years or so.
Turns out trying to get people to retire later is a bad idea
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.
Social Security will be solvent over the next 75 years, but 16% of the gap between spending and revenue remains in the 75th year, meaning the program is not yet sustainable.
YOUR POLICY SELECTIONS % OF GAP CLOSED
Slow Benefit Growth for Top 20% Of Earners 11% Limit Spousal Benefits for High Earners 3% Create Minimum Benefit at 125% of Poverty -3% Means-Test Benefits for Higher Earners 16% Tax All Wages Above $400,000 67% Apply the Payroll Tax to "Cafeteria Plans" 10% TOTAL 104%
And I increased benefits.
And yet, the more I look at it, the more I get the feeling that I might still have to get lucky to be able to retire at retirement age.
We can also examine it by pushing it further. What if the mandatory retirement age was 30? The wages for those under 30 will be higher because of supply and demand, but they'd also have to support all those people over 30 who are not contributing anything to the economy.
In the net, early retirement will lower the standard of living of those still in the workplace.
More specifically it would lower the standard of living for everyone, if you don't count free time.
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?
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.
If one accepts this hypothesis, then raising the retirement age is good for all previously-working people, as they now have less people to support and more workers providing that support...
Some people might plan to work until the day they drop, which is obviously a laudable goal. It's good to contribute to the economy.
Others may purchase an annuity for a target date years or decades in the future, which pay out in basically the same way as social security tends to.
Some (maybe most) would just save more for retirement, because they know if they don't no one will.
Realistically I suspect most people would hedge their bets dynamically go for a combination of these things. Which isn't all that different from the current system, where SS despite being over 20% of the federal budget is considered by most to be woefully inadequate even in the current day for a retirement plan.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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'll probably let the generation that created this mess retire like normal, and instead try to fix it by making their children and grandchildren work until death.
As a business, you can deduct VAT that you had to pay to others from the VAT you charged your customers, and you only pay the difference.
So the only people who end up paying are the final consumers. It is essentially cost neutral to a business - you just have to account for it properly.
UPDATE: in the UK, at least.
Snark aside. I've always heard the idea was that free markets and competition would drive down prices, and that if a company was to just raise their prices, they would actually lose money because people would buy from a competitor with better prices. Turns out companies can just raise prices though. What does it mean when the things that happen in a healthy free market aren't happening?
Well, when they have a monopoly, yes, yes they can.
> Is that free market competition in action?
No.
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 Democrats seem to have no appetite for it either. )
In the past, Republicans would cut taxes ( popular ) while not spending as much ( unpopular ). Democrats would not cut taxes ( unpopular ) while spending more ( popular ).
Sadly, today both parties are acting like undisciplined parents. Everybody wants to give out the treats ( spend big ) while nobody wants to earn the paycheck ( raise the taxes ). It’s a bipartisan formula for disaster.
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 stupid, because the poor have nothing more to give. Even if we could extract 10x the amount of taxes from the poor, it would barely be a blip. If the bottom 50% paid 10x the taxes, then they'd be contributing, what, like 15% of all taxes? We're going to take from the poor, take food out of their mouths, for 15% more taxes? Like I said before, its like trying to squeeze blood from a stone, there's just nothing there to squeeze.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in... https://usafacts.org/articles/who-owns-american-wealth/
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
Instead of taxing income or spending, tax wealth. Will the wealthy make themselves less wealthy in order to avoid a wealth tax? I don't think so. Tax the top 1%; even with a wealth tax they'll still be able to afford multiple homes and a yacht--hell, there are people who can afford two homes and a yacht and don't even fall in the top 1%, so people will still be able to have plenty without ever actually paying a wealth tax.
Like one person I know is a German citizen living and working in the USA with a permanent resident visa, and she owns some forestry land in Canada. Should that land be subject to a wealth tax and if so how would you value it? Does the IRS then need to hire an army of bureaucrats to calculate valuations on those assets?
a wealth tax of 1% reduces the return on the stock market for that year to 6%, but it compounds onto follow-on years; if you "wealth tax" every year, that effectively lowers the return on the market very dramatically. If the returns on the stock market are lowered dramatically, you will see a huge slowdown in the economy.
the point of this is, there isn't really such a thing as a "wealth tax", it's just a "multiplied income tax". it might be different in your head, but you're wrong, it's not different in reality. you are welcome for the free education.
the question is, why is the only thing you can think of "take money from people who have it". that's a zero sum game, no wealth creation. What makes market economies so wonderful to live in is their wealth creation.
Why does Elon have so much money? wealth creation. Here's why: without Tesla, the roads would not be empty of cars, people would just buy different cars. There are other car companies, GM, Ford, Nissan, Honda, Volkswagen, etc.
Tesla is not taking your money. Tesla is offering an alternative car to buy with your money. With no Tesla, you would plunk your money down on one of those other brands, but if you like Tesla's better, you buy one of those. That creates happiness, you are happier spending your money on a Tesla than on the alternatives. That's the money that Elon is collecting, GM's money and some extra for your excitement/satisfaction. And he deserves it because he created it and you are happy that he did. You would not be richer without Tesla. You would buy a different brand, and be out the same amount of money, and enjoy your car less. So when you think "we need to take Elon's money" you are essentially saying "I wish Elon didn't exist and I want the crappy Nissan for less money". That's a spiral into the ground because the other company's don't put as much value into their cars as Tesla and if you paid them less, they'd produce less.
If your response to this is "I would never buy a Tesla, I don't even like them", then I will just shake my head sadly at your inability to learn even more.
QSBS is capped, and the SALT deduction goes away with increasing MAGI. They're targeted at the upper middle class, not the wealthy.
The "S" in QSBS stands for "Small" business.
The previous limits were fixed, and this change seems to be adjusting it for inflation. It's been around since 1993. An inflation adjustment is not a "cut".
Even so, as I'm sure you're aware, these two items are not what people mean by "tax cuts for the wealthy". If you ask anyone (other than a tax accountant) what a QSBS deduction is, you'll get a blank stare.
Things like QSBS and carried interest are absolutely part of what people mean by "tax cuts for the wealthy".
Or are you saying the Trump tax cuts never benefited the wealthy at all?
Of course. It's disingenuous to claim that not raising taxes is a "cut".
It's the same lie as claiming a reduction in a spending increase is a "budget cut".
There are actual tax cuts in Trump's bill, but they don't apply to the wealthy.
It's not a "cut", it's just that the BBB makes taxes lower for the wealthy than they would have been without the BBB <eyeroll>.
Given that, software work at 67 should be well within cognitive limits.
(I'm actually not sure if I'm being sarcastic)
I live in a rural community filled with farmers and FiFo workers (fly in | fly out mine and rig workers) with a median age of ~ 60 years.
My father has worked hard manual labour his entire life, he only recently stopped splitting wood and climbing ladders. He was born in 1935.
He's not unusual here, many 60 and 70 year olds, 80 year olds even, are still active on the land here.
Rephrased, it's just as problematic, albeit with a kernel of truthiness:
Quite an assumption on your part.
Despite having serious mathematical qualifications and several million SLOC of code behind me, I've also worked cattle stations, mine sites, and been part of SES and St. John's Ambulance crews (first responders to accidents).
That said, to address your question,
he's not worked with either Aaron Swartz nor Terry Davis.
The outside view is that the US has minimal Occ Health & Safety enforcement in labour and was late to the game in any case.
It's not just the age at which the government lets you claim OASDI and Medicare. It's also the fact that in the US at least, we've basically set up the entire economy around the idea of paying retirement/pension funds first and foremost, C-suites second, and the people creating the actual value third.
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-...
Diligently save away and invest a portion of your income and you'll be alright.
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 you were starting to pull out benefits."
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?end=2023&lo...
Top-end compensation has gone through the roof compared to "regular" worker compensation since we started cutting tax rates on the rich. And we also have no shortage of deductions and shelters today either.
So why shouldn't we raise the rates back to at least reduce the consolidation and government revenue trends that have happened since we lowered them?
Here's one quick source that 5 seconds on Google turned up - https://city-countyobserver.com/did-people-really-pay-91-tax... - estimates suggest that top earners in the 50s payed a 42-45% effective tax rate vs today's 26-28% effective tax rate. That's a pretty giant difference! Interestingly, despite that, the top 1% paid a bit smaller of a fraction of total tax income (30-35% vs 40% today) suggesting that it may have helped spread the money around so that the 2-5%, 5-15%, etc parts of the population were relatively better off compared to the top 1%. Less of the top 1% hitting the top marginal rate suggests that it's a rather useful incentive for keeping your salaries less obscene.
While Israel didn't build the next "Intel", it built the next Cisco (Palo Alto Networks), Symantec (Wiz), Akamai, and it's own "Intel" (Tower Semiconductors), and Israeli VC has absolutely cornered the Enterprise SaaS and cybersecurity industry.
Yet, concentrating on business creation seems to ignore the fact that high value industries like much of tech just don't generate that much employment.
The high-tech sector only represents a little over 11% of overall employment in Israel [0]
Median gross salary is around $2800/mo [1] yet tech salaries are around $10,000/mo [2]
While the tech industry is extremely prominent in Israel, it isn't a major employment generator. Most Israelis don't work in tech and are impacted by extremely high CoL - Israel has some of the highest cost of living among OECD countries [3]
This article posits that additional industrial policy can help rebuild large employment industries. While I am strongly in favor of industrial policy, most high value industries are high value EXPLICITLY because they are heavily automated or have low headcount requirements.
Industrial policy for the sake of generating employment simply doesn't work when high value jobs have significant barriers to entry (no, not everyone can code and not everyone can synthesize biopharmaceuticals).
[0] - https://innovationisrael.org.il/en/press_release/2025-high-t...
[1] - https://www.xn----1hcmgxnk8ede.co.il/%D7%9B%D7%9E%D7%94-%D7%...
[2] - https://www.bizportal.co.il/general/news/article/20017760
[3] - https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/icp/data
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.
- 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 wealthiest countries on earth can't afford to let people who are 60 years old retire. Other than of course the wealthy would have to pay slightly more in taxes.
I can't find it now but I saw an article talking about all the social and policy ideas that unwittingly got tested in the Covid pandemic. The effects of giving money to poor people (it's not the moral hazard it's made out to be), how schools increase the spread of disease and a whole host of others.
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, means that an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars in tax go uncollected every year in the United States alone [1]. Imagine what the federal deficit looks like if the US had to borrow a few hundred billion less each year. It's far from zero, but it's better than it looks now.
Retirement isn't a right, it's a math problem. For most of human history, if you lived long enough to get too old to do labor, you were expected to do something (usually helping with childrearing or teaching skills to younger generations) in order to lessen the burden of your existence to others, mainly your family. Now that most labor isn't actually physical and people are living longer, there's less excuse for doing nothing for 10+ years off of savings besides just wanting to. Unfortunately, given the size of deficits in lots of Western nations and the stagnating wages of the younger generations, those retirement accounts are becoming more attractive as a way to pay off debt that the people holding those accounts created.
[1] https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-forgoes-hundr...
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.
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.
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 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.
Many of these people have done physically demanding but completely necessary jobs their entire lives. Their bodies can be wrecked.
I don't know your circumstances but generally speaking I see a lot of "tech-hubris" on HN. People who skew younger and are very privileged to work in tech. The hubris part is being young, many think this will go on forever. The reality is ageism is rampant in tech. The other part is thinking you won't be impacted by automation (and AI).
Will you be bagging groceries until you're 67-69 because Amazon made an AI that now does your job?
[1]: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/assets.html
[2]: https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_corporate_profits_quarterl...
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.
Certainly not all 60 year olds, but plenty of 60 year olds are still actively working in trades. There is a massive gap between, say, doing the building and installing of carpentry related things, and being a grocery store greeter.
It not unreasonable for people to take on a more teaching side of their job and doing much less of the heavy lifting parts. Being in a position to pass on knowledge and technique to the next generation is probably the best things for society and even for many of the individuals as a sense of purpose. The majority of the people I know around me don't know what to do with themselves when they aren't working, so still having something to do isn't a bad thing to them. They just don't want to keep working 40 hours a week to live paycheck to paycheck.
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.
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.
We could shuffle some numbers around with fiscal, monetary and labour policies in ways that would result in far more wealth flowing from the old to the young, rather than from the young to the old as is happening now, and it would still be true that “people earned their savings and can spend it how they see fit”.
As for the younger generations, they have even less wealth than those of retirement age. Why should they chip in?
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.
Because due to the current brain dead policies of the GOP in the US, life expectancies in the US are falling.
So instead of storing up Social Security by making the ultra rich pay their fair share, people who do real work to enrich these people will have to work longer. That means they will have a shorter and less healthy retirement.
Now, I am guessing about 40% of people in the US will never be able to retire. I know a couple in that situation right now.
The GOP has been trying to kill of Social Security for almost 50 years, I fully expect they will succeed in 10 years or so.