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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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I'm not describing a sovereign wealth fund.

SWF are financed, normally, through commodity exports or foreign exchange reserves. I'm suggesting a method whereby general treasury receipts (taxes) are invested in direct association with a live birth in the United States.

Again, this ongoing misinterpretation of my position doesn't seem come across as particularly innocent. There are definitely some major potential flaws in my idea (which is why it's a back-of-the-envelope solution I'm posting to an anonymous message board). I think the biggest one is the moral hazard of a nearly $200bn injection of cash into the market annually by the government. The resulting asset bubbles would be pretty outrageous.

But I'm proposing even this basic blueprint of a solution because the current system, the Social Security Trust, will fail in the next ten years. Most likely, we'll just end up reducing benefits, raising the retirement age, and then setting a hard cutoff wherein all but the destitute receive zero benefits (my guess is those with a birth year of 1980 or later).

Bro, you must realize that what you're proposing has been proposed many times before, in various forms. Mostly famously by Bush in 2000s. I think there was a decent argument for it back then, but also lots of arguments against it which I paraphrased. I didn't doing anything malicious to you, it's just I've heard this debate way too many times. It's definitely not a good idea to pump government money into equities (either as a soverieng wealth fund or any other similar form) when equity Price-Earnings ratios are near all-time highs.