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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30112 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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Any discussion here needs to start with the actual federal budget. About 60% of which is Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Military. Cutting the DOE down to 0 would cut ~10% off the deficit. You could eliminate a solid majority of federal government departments and still not arrive at a budget surplus. Most of them are tiny relative to the size of the deficit.

Yeah, man social security is such a screwed up situation. Really unfortunate for all around.

TBH I think creating social security may have been the #1 political blunder of the last century. Just an incredibly awful decision. I can understand where it was coming from but oof... it has crippled us economically.

Every developed country on earth has public pensions.

In place of social security, what should we have instead? An opt-out system like Germany? Chile’s semi-private system?

Maybe a pension system where it can't be raided to fund overseas wars and other things? Or I don't know, a system where instead of going into a big government account, the money goes into an account you actually personally own?

I'm not saying it's a terrible idea, I'm saying that the implementation is beyond fucked.

Or I don't know, a system where instead of going into a big government account, the money goes into an account you actually personally own?

AKA the Australian superannuation system where every few years the government notices that people who make a lot of money have a lot in their retirement accounts and the poor people don't and maybe we need to mess with the rules a bit to mitigate this unfairness...

Yeah, creating pots of money under government control often has unintended consequences.

TBH I think creating social security may have been the #1 political blunder of the last century. Just an incredibly awful decision. I can understand where it was coming from but oof... it has crippled us economically.

I think it could be salvaged to be a great policy. We just need to tie political positions to a maximum age that is the same as the retirement age. If you are eligible for social security, then you are ineligible for office.

Older politicians would have an incentive to raise the retirement age, but voters and younger politicians would have an incentive to block it. Raising it solves the fiscal crisis, lowering it keeps the old fogies out from running our government further into the ground.

This is a clever idea. Me likey.

This would be interesting in industry too. Maybe we put a cap on full time, but let older folks come in as consultants or advisors or something and cap em at 10 hours a week.

Eh, I'd keep it limited to government. Because many people suck at saving for retirement, even with social security as a guaranteed minimum income.

If anything, just change the way laws work with respect to age discrimination. Legalize discrimination by age for people that are over the retirement age.

Not sure I agree. Social Security existed in the same form it does now when we last had a budget surplus.

Worker to retiree ratio was far different, however.

I wonder how much the people who instituted Social Security, which is basically the world's largest pyramid scheme, can be reasonably blamed for not seeing this coming.

On the one hand, the theoretical argument that "exponential population growth can't go on forever" is pretty strong. On the other hand, literally all empirical evidence up to that point was that population always grows exponentially until it hits Malthusian limits; the demographic transition was a hell of black swan.

And, of course, trying to make up for the missing grandchildren by importing infinite low-productivity foreigners into the magic dirt is just retarded.

Is that true?

This chart says the ratio was just over 3:1 starting in the 70s. It cuts off at 2013, which makes me suspicious as hell, but there’s not a ton of movement.

It was 3.4 at the end of Clinton's term. It's ~2.7 now. The figure after the decimal matters

Thanks.

I’m having a hard time seeing a 25% drop as categorically different. It’s certainly not an improvement…

That 25% drop is a 25% increase in the cost of the program as a burden on individual payers. If the program previously made up 40% of the budget then it would now make up 50% if nothing else changed. Seems like a big difference to me when that is basically a trillion dollars.

Its why small changes to social security basically make or break the US budget. Raising the retirement age is one way to help the ratio, and they've started doing that. They can also undercount inflation and then the program gets an effective paycut. They've been doing that.

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