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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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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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