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...
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.
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.Given that, software work at 67 should be well within cognitive limits.
(I'm actually not sure if I'm being sarcastic)
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-...
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
- 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.