In the US at least, the original retirement age, set in 1935, was 65. The average life expectancy was 60. Today in the US it's 77.8. In France, it's 82.
As populations age into a higher percentage of retirees, the system is forced to cope with more people who are purely consumers, and contribute nothing to the system. In a post-scarcity world, this would not be a problem, but currently with the oldest generations owning the vast majority of wealth and real estate, and with college, housing, and many costs of living having inflated 3-20x since the older generations were younger, it is a problem.
Giving old people money for free when their 10x more valuable houses inflate the market, keeping the younger generation from being able to start families, is a killing blow for population growth and the livelihoods of younger generations.
That's just because people died young. The mode (most common) age of death was over 75 in France for men in 1930. I'm not sure how WWII factors into that. It's now about 82, eyeballing it (yes, still higher).
People were not "old" and dying at appreciably higher rates given they reached age 60 back then. The general premise that there's a lot of rich old people now is true. But the factors that have raised life expectancy are probably working against this trend, and to minor effect, as they primarily raise the current number of kids.
My understanding was that almost all countries with advanced economies are experiencing negative growth in producing children. So even if you are right about the nuance in age, go look at Japan. Their population is shrinking.
Purely economically, only a total moron would have a child. Child labor has been outlawed and society says the (grown) child is their cash cow not yours, so the retirement from taxing the kid is spread across everyone else. Meanwhile you're asked to pay the lions share of the investment for everybody else to cash out on. So the name of the game is to let everybody else have the kids and free-ride the fuck out of that by paying some token contribution like the property tax for their grade school or whatever and then taking advantage of their tax dollars when you get older.
This is a huge departure from almost all of human history except the last 100 years in the developed world, where the family formerly was the safety net so these kind of investments and arrangements stayed in the family leaving a much stronger economic incentive for children.
There's also the aspect that old people will feel bothered by your kids and complain if they have to endure hearing happy kids after 6PM. Even though they were the ones who bought the house next to the playground...
> Purely economically, only a total moron would have a child.
OK but nobody is making that decision "purely economically." Returning to a world of filial piety laws and no real social safety net sounds nightmarish.
>This is a huge departure from almost all of human history except the last 100 years in the developed world, where the family formerly was the safety net so these kind of investments and arrangements stayed in the family leaving a much stronger economic incentive for children.
except the evidence seems to point towards kids being a net drain, even in preindustrial societies.
Feels a bit like saying the compressor is a net drain on a jet engine. Sure, if you disconnected the compressor while running, the engine would make a lot of power for a very brief moment. But the compressor is needed to keep the engine running.
Except the linked article argues that in hunter gatherer societies, kids were a net drain even when their parents were approaching retirement, and in agricultural societies there were "retirement" options in the form of land ownership and financial instruments.
Some of the calculations they made were utterly bizarre. Like assuming the child wasn't paying anything forward until "retirement" of the parent. All adults being net positive is not the same as the elders not benefitting from in-kin capture of investments in a scheme that almost resembles taxation moving benefit upwards in in-kin seniority.
So if you were living in an agricultural society, you would trust their financial instruments and institutions governing land ownership more than you would trust your own family? Really?
I’m not sure what you’re saying. There are other factors that have changed between now and then, such as the general acceptability of being unmarried, family planning tools, reduced religiosity, and woolier stuff like people’s idea of what a good life is.
If you are employed in manual labor then I'm not sure how working into your mid-70s is supposed to work. It seems like it's just saying that people should go off and die.
I think you're making a big leap to saying that economics are the reason people aren't having kids. Many people who are financially well off don't want kids either. I haven't looked for good numbers, but it seems the poorest members of society have the most kids, while the richest have the least (could be some issue with lack of controls here).
"Able to have kids" isn't the only economic factor. "Incentivized to have kids" is another.
Kids used to be cheap labor plus a retirement package. Now they are an expensive hobby. With privatized costs and socialized benefits (or, if you prefer, benefits that get sucked to the top of the social pyramid), kid production stopped making sense for kid producers and we are seeing a supply shortfall. If we fix the incentives we can fix the supply shortfall. Even a partial fix is probably sufficient -- people enjoy having kids, they just need the personal economic consequences to be less of a flaming trainwreck.
'"Able to have kids" isn't the only economic factor. "Incentivized to have kids" is another.
...
people enjoy having kids, they just need the personal economic consequences to be less of a flaming trainwreck.'
You start out saying one thing and end up saying something different.
The point is, even when people have the money, they don't want kids, or at least not very many. If people truly want kids, then they are already incentivized and just need to be able to.
Parents already get tax breaks for kids. Primary and secondary education costs are mostly covered via taxes, whether one has kids or not. So there are already economic incentives, they just aren't a net benefit to the parents. I don't believe making them a net benefit is the right course of action since that has potential problems as well.
The social safety net will cover that. SNAP, WIC, CHIP, Medicaid, school, are all covered. All you need is subsidized housing and to know where the different charities are that have free food and clothing.
If you look at the link I previously posted, the under $10k a year group have the highest birthrate. So it can be done.
Hmm, sounds like forbidding pensions would fix that (make older people rely on their kids).
Cheap labor is no more, especially in the age of highly specialized jobs requiring education (manual labor is greatly automated now, especially in agriculture, compared to 100 years ago).
How else would we incentivise it? Money payouts on birth don't work -- only poor people would make good use of it, middle class would see the payouts too small for them anyway.
Depends on the payout. I’m decidedly middle class, as are practically all my friends, my large family would probably qualify as „rich“, but I and everyone I know are still weary of the financial burden of having kids. Although my personal theory is that it is not so much the cost, but the lost income potential and career opportunities for women that keeps people from having (more) kids.
I think they're still relevant but in a different way. Upper-class parents have higher expectations for the amount of extracurricular education and activities their children are going to do and it's infeasible for them to do that with many.
I think the population distribution by age band in the different eras would illustrate why there was enough money then and insufficient money now.
The premise wasn’t that you the worker would pay your own retirement but that you would pay for the current crop of retirees and then when you retire the younger age bands would be paying for your retirement.
If the worker would be funding their own retirements then they have to pay in a whole lot more.
"If the worker would be funding their own retirements then they have to pay in a whole lot more."
What? That doesn't make any sense. If my social security contributions went into a bank account that was invested, I'd be way ahead of what social security will pay me.
Did that article you link say anything about the ratio of those that reached 60 or not? In a pay as you go system what matters is the ratio of retired to working and in a system that is actuarialy sound and actually saving then the percentage that pays in and does not collect by dying before retirement matters a lot. The most common age you die given you make it to 60 is pretty irrelevant in both situations other than it indirectly partially relates to the load of old people you have to contend with in the system, which is what actually matters in both situations.
75 was the most common age to die for French males from that time across the board. Not conditioned on making it to 60.
The "life expectancy" of someone given they made it to 60 was similarly high. Highlighted only to dispel people's imaginations that people used to be "old" when they reached their society's average life expectancy. They don't look physically old. Nor are they even outliers. 1930s French society would have had lots of people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s,
Why does the mode matter? We are discussing cost, which is related to the the number of retirees. The average lifespan tells you how many people you can expect to be retired at a given moment, the mode tells you... what exactly?
If you have 100 people of which 50 died below age 10 and the 50 that survived lived to 75 that's a lot of retirees.
If all 100 survive past age 10 but 90 of them die before age 65 you have not a lot of retirees.
The exact numbers can work out to the same "life expectancy" with wildly different results for retirement planning. And also in genealogy the high infant mortality rate makes for small average life expectancies and you might be surprised how old most people that survived to adulthood actually got.
When someone says the life expectancy used to be lower and we now have a lot of people who are old are not working would lead you to believe that there were not a lot of old people not working in the past. That would be wrong. The plurality of people were dying at 75 as I said.
The average lifespan is very insufficient to tell you how many people you can expect to be retired at a given moment.
1. A high infant mortality rate brings average lifespan down.
2. Infants don't contribute to the economy nor to public pension funds.
A country might have low life expectancy, but a relatively close number of workers and retirees, as life expectances can be (even more so in developing countries) multimodal.
These people are not contributing during retirement, but HAVE contributed in the past. In fact people pay (especially in places like France) into a government retirement fund.
And this happens over 20-40 years of work. This is a long time and if properly managed, should be fine.
So people aren't just being given "free money", this is something that they have paid for and so they are protesting, because it's basically a kind of service that they have been promised in exchange for being taxed each pay check.
But I still come back to the question of what you will do at retirement?
The people should themselves be managing their retirement corpus. Some would become rich, some would be poor but in the end they won't take money off the taxpayers.
Instead they gave their money to governments who immediately consumed, mismanaged, gave it to themselves and while kicking the can down the road with cheap loans.
Now, current governments are left with old people with no money demanding benefits and young people getting taxed into poverty.
> There is no retirement “fund” in the way that word implies
well, France really has 2 systems (to simplify, it's really more like 42+), the "public" one (i.e. civil servants) and the "private" one (i.e. anyone employed by an employer other than the state).
The "public" retirement is based on the assumption that the state guarantees its liability for future pensions but doesn't actually put it on the books (if it did real debt would be another 2,000 billions euros), while the "private" retirement does have a "fund" (really several of them, one per sector of the economy) but it's revolving money put in by the current workforce but paying immediately current pensioners. This second system can in theory have excess money (but every time it does, a law is passed to extract some more money out of it to the benefit of the first!).
Part of the issue in France is the existence of these 2 systems and the very fact that the state allows itself to do its accounting differently (in a way that unlawful for anybody else). If at least the state played by the same rules... (of course then it would have to recognize this extra debt of 2,000 billions euros, and that would disqualify the country from the eurozone!).
But in short, yes it is very much the government's problem. They (since 1945) have "organized" pensions in a way that makes them a time bomb both in its accounting, and in its unjust rules (rules vary a lot per sector of the economy).
The status quo is so bizarre. Human life has no inherent value unless it makes continuous contributions to "the economy". It would be economically most efficient to drop dead on the day you retire. Thanks, human!
All of this to keep a machine running that wrecks the planet and everything living on it, including ourselves. Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy.
At some point we lost the plot. The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.
> Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy.
You mean that 50% of the economy is bullshit that you think nobody should ask for. You and I may agree that developer at an online gambling company is economically useless, but the their boss certainly doesn't and the gamblers probably don't either.
Even if we accept your premise, you can't just assume that tanking the economy will only cut out the useless jobs instead of the useful ones. Useful jobs are perhaps more likely to survive, but that's not always going to be the case. During the next recession, people will more likely give up on a solar roof than give up gambling.
> The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.
People's lives are objectively improving. It mostly just happening in Asia though. It requires a lot of money to build power plants, hospitals, and water towers, and much of that was financed by selling "useless" trinkets from the West.
Sometimes people fail to recognize that the oldest super powerful artificial intelligence is several hundred years old. It’s our economic system.
It’s the software running on all our “wet ware” that convinces us to value productivity and money over human life, the environment, or happiness. It is the paper clip maximizer and it’s happily churning away.
But we’re not maximizing paper clips we’re maximizing profits .
What does it mean to value human life? I would argue that the economic engine has given us ALL of the improvements in quality of life, and the fact that we live so much longer than we used to, IS valuing human life. There is no other way we could have given ourselves all of the amazing things (tech-wise) we have today.
Why would we value the environment over human lives? That just seems like nature-worship.
> The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.
If trees could just all agree to remain short, they wouldn't need to waste resources to outgrow each other to reach sunlight.
> Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy.
Obviously this cannot be true. "The economy" isn't some magical object somewhere, but the emergent behavior from all our needs, desires and faults. If something is truly not wanted by anyone, nobody will pay for the work to get done. That's the magic of the invisible hand of capitalism. Doing stuff that truly nobody wants and getting paid for it is usually more of a feature of socialism and bureaucracies.
There are cases where individual motive leads to macro behavior that's not desirable by any individual, those are the cases where we need to tax negative externalities or regulate, depending on the problem. These issues usually don't emerge though because nobody wants something but because too many wanting a thing creates side effects that nobody likes. The book Micromotived and Macro behavior by Thomas Schelling covers that nicely.
Just look at the huge amount of money being invested into advertising, PR, and marketing. That industry is mostly focused on finding psychological tricks to manipulate us into wanting things we just don't need, in various ways.
One of the best known examples is the PR-manufactured tradition of diamonds in engagement rings, which sky-rocketed the demand for diamonds in the general population.
Another great example is the huge industry of "supplements" which is legalized fraud on a massive scale, selling useless pills to people with a promise of making them better in some way, and relying solely on the fact that it's hard to prove that they don't actually do anything since their claims are so vague.
These are prime examples of entirely artificial demand created out of whole cloth through manipulation. There are numerous other cases of more subtle effects, where marketing is significantly inflating a demand which would exist but be much smaller otherwise (toys, smartphone upgrades, new cars every few years, beauty products, fashion etc).
>but that want is itself manufactured by the economy.
Is that an issue? There's not much demand for 8k ohm SMD resistors from people, but people do want smartphones that require 8k ohm SMD resistors to manufacture. The same applies for stuff like managers and other "bullshit jobs". Nobody wants them, but they're nonetheless required to keep the company/economy humming along. And if they're actually not required, then the economy that supposedly cares what's "economically most efficient" should have eliminated them.
I think the previous poster may be thinking more along the lines of a Mickey Mouse shaped bar of soap, rather than an important component of something useful, like resistors.
There is a mountain of trash end-products out there, which marketing is creating the want for. These products may not otherwise exist without the manufactured want, and could be removed entirely without much detriment to the very small amount of people that conscientiously decided of their own free will they wanted that product.
Marketing is what makes something like a Peloton a viable business, rather than those customers just taking a regular static bike and adding a tablet mount to the handlebars.
In some senses, I think the economy isn't always looking for the most efficient methods. I believe there is some political input involved to keep everybody's heads down under a quagmire of pointless work, so those people (even in a democracy) don't start asking too many questions. Some people could easily be automated out of work, yet they aren't, despite the efficiency it would bring.
To each their own, but I'd be fine with a huge amount of (what I deem) useless products and jobs being removed from the market. Most serve very little real purpose and as somebody else stated, are destroying our planet and wasting away the best years of our lives to attain them.
I would frame it with a different emphasis. Want is inherent to living organisms, humans and others alike. The economy discovers, amplifies, and satisfies our wants. But it is also important to remember that economies emergent, not some external object imposed on humans.
Don't confuse the metrics with the thing itself. The economy is not metrics in the human mind. The economy is me liking Envy apples more than disgusting Red Delicious apples and buying Envy instead. The economy is an employee getting a good offer to fill a need a company has and going back to their current employer to find out who will pay them more / gets more value from them and it's willing to thus pay more. Things like the GDP just try to approximate the sum of all these actions and exchanges.
It most certainly is and I have not encountered anything to indicate otherwise. Individual transactions are no more relevant than GDP is. These are individual metrics or acts that influence those metrics, which try to quantify aspects of an aggregate concept.
You’re comparing decades of productivity going to capital to debt incurred within the last half decade (“Here's where the money went”).
The US does have a lot of sovereign debt, no doubt, but that’s not why Labor isn’t seeing a greater share of the productivity gains since the 70s. A loss of collective labor power and 10% of the country owning 89% of public equities gets us here.
To arrived at an improved end state, one would need more unions and labor organizing, as well as perhaps ratcheting down the work week to 4 days.
I presented a chart going back to 1970. It covers the time period in question. It shows an enormous increase in government per-person spending. Why do you think that has nothing to do with where did the money from the productivity increase go?
> why Labor isn’t seeing a greater share of the productivity gains since the 70s
Globalization seems like a major factor that's often ignored for that. We had productivity gains. We didn't benefit from them as much as expected because people in Asia had bigger productivity gains. Joe six pack now competes with people in China working 996 instead of just his neighbors like in the 70s.
The other political sports team cuts taxes for the rich too. For instance they recently removed the cap on the SALT tax deduction which primarily benefits rich people, largely in coastal cities, i.e. those most likely to vote for and donate to them.
This isn’t true - the cap on SALT tax deduction hasn’t changed since it was put in place in 2017.
Some members of congress, apparently from both major parties, are proposing legislation to raise the cap from $10,000 to $100,000 or otherwise raise or remove the cap. But these proposals are not certain to go anywhere.
Ha ha ha. If you taxed 100% of the wealth of the wealthiest (Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, John Kerry, et al - everyone worth say over $100 million) amongst us, you wouldn't even make a dent in the national debt. And I mean take every nickel they have, the national debt will still be out of control. The old saw that tax cuts for the wealthiest increases the national debt is an argument that simply cannot stand up to scrutiny.
They are contributing to entertaining end users of the casino. Entertainment is a valid need. You or some academic in an ivory tower can't dictate worth or contribution. It is determined democratically by actions of consumers (literally voting with dollars).
That said, there are some jobs we can easily label as zero wroth. E.g., jobs where people dig pits and fill them up (common in job schemes in socialist countries). These are jobs that powerful folks invent to remain in power by bribing poorer folks.
A mega job-guarantee program to alleviate massive rural distress may have had an unexpected, deleterious effect: luring India’s skilled labour away from the organised sector. ... Lured by the lesser effort involved—MGNREGA jobs like digging pits and filling them don’t need any skills—they leave their factory jobs to work for 100 days under the program and then take up other contractual jobs for the rest of the year.
Nokku kooli is a euphemism for extortion by organized labour unions in Kerala under which bribes are paid to trade union activists in exchange for allowing unaffiliated workers to unload their own belongings and materials.[1] This happens with the tacit support of political parties including those in government. In Malayalam, 'nokku kooli', translates into 'gawking wages' or 'wages for (just) looking on'.[2]
Bullshit jobs are not specific to state capitalist ("socialist") economies - they are a constant of all capitalist systems, as common in big corporations in the USA as they are in China or they were in the USSR. They do tend to take different shapes, but they are a natural effect of corruption, which tends to affect all large organizations.
> Bullshit jobs are not specific to state capitalist
Yes, but unlike in socialist governments, companies with a lot of bullshit jobs will die due to being inefficient. Thats the point of capitalism. Nobody has to work to support other able bodied humans rent seeking off their labor and capital.
But in the US this is not true, as we don't have true capitalism in the US, we have a socialist mix and the govt can sometimes prop up inefficient companies.
But in socialism, authoritarians will remain in power for decades even if the majority doesn't like it. Rent seeking is a natural state of affairs in more socialist countries.
> But in the US this is not true, as we don't have true capitalism in the US, we have a socialist mix and the govt can sometimes prop up inefficient companies.
This is the "no true capitalist" fallacy. The reality of capitalism is that big companies get to impose whatever they want on any smaller entity they want. They may either do so directly (e.g. when operating in a weak country, like Chiquita's Banana Republics) or by co-opting government (either in cahoots with an authoritarian government like the USSR or China, or a democratic government like the USA or Europe). And big corporations will always have local fiefdoms with bullshit jobs, since corruption rears its ugly head in any large org - be it Oracle or the US Federal government.
> Thats the point of capitalism. Nobody has to work to support other able bodied humans rent seeking off their labor and capital.
Before claiming such hilarious idealism, maybe take a look at the capitalist US South and the way it was built by 150 years or more of slave labor.
How is it different from the "no true socialist/communist" fallacy that is more common?
> Before claiming such hilarious idealism, maybe take a look at the capitalist US South and the way it was built by 150 years or more of slave labor.
A free market requires free participants. Therefore, the US South was not purely capitalist. Also, slavery was not the only component in building the South. Other continents and countries have/had slavery for longer periods and are poorer.
The US South was an exploitative mix of socialism + capitalism that was defeated by the more capitalist and freer North.
> The reality of capitalism is that big companies get to impose whatever they want on any smaller entity they want.
Which exploitative project by a company has the lifespan and reach of CCP or Soviet Russia's decades long exploitation and rent seeking?
The difference is Oracle can't force you to buy their database for your small company but you have to pay gawking wages even if you are a poor person.
> weak country ... or by co-opting government (either in cahoots with an authoritarian government like the USSR or China, or a democratic government like the USA or Europe).
Thank you, thats my point. They can't survive long unless they are supported by an authoritarian govt or by a weak govt.
It is obvious now that we are arguing in circles with you supporting my point. So I guess we can end the conversation here.
It seems that to you, capitalist simply means free market, and you call any kind of state intervention socialist. If those are the definitions, we probably agree.
However, that is not how those terms are normally defined or used. Capitalism means "an economic system where most enterprises are wholy owned by those who invest the initial capital". This differs from earlier economic models like feudalism, where enterprises were typically wholy owned by a lord through hereditary rule.
Socialism is normally defined as "an economic system where most enterprises are wholy owned by the workers who work in them".
Socialism can very well be a free market system, just like workers co-ops compete today with other worker's co-ops and more traditional capitalist corporations. Conversely, an economic system doesn't stop being capitalist just because there are tariffs or subsidies or other interventions by the state.
In particular, you can have a purely capitalist system with slave labor, since workers' rights are entirely irrelevant to whether a system is capitalist or not. In fact, freeing slaves has usually posed a problem to those with capital, and so the states that forced them to free their slave typically had to reimburse the owners for their loss of property as if they had nationalized a piece of land.
Later edit:
> Thank you, thats my point. They can't survive long unless they are supported by an authoritarian govt or by a weak govt.
My point about the weak government was that a powerful corporation faced with a weak government will just hire its own mercenaries and do what it wants, ignoring any law (usually forcing people to work) - like Chiquita and other banana companies did in South America.
I understand the sentiment, but in this current system, that counts as contributing because eventually it can be exchanged into something that you consume (e.g. food, housing, healthcare). Even if there were no money and everything works with barters, you'd still have to offer something that other people need. Unless somehow you could survive without requiring food etc from someone else, then they won't force you to "contribute to the system"
I think you contribute with real dollars (in Europe case, it's Euros). Whether these euros are derived from a real activity (ie: garbage collection) or a fake activity (ie: finance and eh, politics) or a negative activity (ie: a tobacco company). It's irrelevant.
uh, didn't the old people finance their own social security? Didn't they give up money their whole lives to finance their homes? Don't they contribute to society in other less-measurable ways?
That said, there could be some ways to retire, but be able to work in such a way that retirement is not adversely affected. Some of my friends who retired had to carefully not work or social security was adversely affected.
> In the original Act benefits were to be paid only to the primary worker when he/she retired at age 65. Benefits were to be based on payroll tax contributions that the worker made during his/her working life. Taxes would first be collected in 1937 and monthly benefits would begin in 1942. (Under amendments passed in 1939, payments were advanced to 1940.)
That's from https://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html - so generally, the old were financed by the younger at inception, and that's basically continued ever since. Nobody funded their own SSN fully between 1937 and 1940.
That sort of insurance is still a good idea.
The "house" part of the person you're replying to's post is interesting: "Giving old people money for free when their 10x more valuable houses inflate the market"
By definition, anyone whose house is 10x more valuable than it was when they bought it is not inflating the market. The people buying at the new price are the ones driving the current valuation of that house.
But constrained supply does also come into play; and other forms of social assistance are conditional on income levels and such; it wouldn't be totally unreasonable or unprecedented to make some benefits conditional on assets in cases like that - if you're sitting on a 900k asset, maybe leverage that first if you don't otherwise have any savings? And in doing so, open up that spot for a younger generation that still has to commute, etc?
> uh, didn't the old people finance their own social security?
No, that's the original marketing but the payments you get out of it aren't related to the ones you put into it i.e. they're just a tax to fund the program.
Same in Italy but it’s related to how much you paid, it’s not the same money. The money I’m currently paying are used to finance pensions to people retired now.
When I’ll retire (will never happen at this rate) I’ll get a pension that’s based on how much I contributed but the money will come from people who will still be working.
We are living in an artificial scarcity world is more of a problem than us not having enough capacity to sustain retirement and increase leisure time of the pre-retirement demographics.
Technologically, imho we have been beyond a post scarcity level for quite a while - its our economic system and its poor allocation of wealth and resource allocation that is antiquated, irrational, and constraining the system. Austerity is just giving up at actually building the system in the ways needed for more people to retire or even live out their lives avoiding things like climate change.
Austerity is the neoliberal elites like Macron way of feigning poverty. They want a small, weak government, powerful businesses, and an impoverished society completely dependent on their whims and generosity.
Any government wants power, money, and having society depend on them. The bigger and more powerful the government, the more they can do.
Same with companies: the larger the more annoying, but at least you can choose them, and there's competition. Not so much with governments, they just act like a powerful monopolistic megacorp.
The goal is to make power decentralized, not further concentrated in a few hands, especially not a government that can get away with it as much as they want, and even use violence, contempt and oppression if needed.
I am skeptical that blanket decentralization works without some central framework to maintain it. Otherwise power still accumulates and without some enforcement of openness and a collective discussion - corruption also grows perfectly fine without government involved. See decentralized crypto industry as a microcosm.
I would say that government and a healthy protest of government as the French are exercising is one way to check the over accumulation of oppressive power.
To add, simply take a look at the % of USA federal spending that goes to Medicare and Social Security, which are benefits for the over 65 population. It's 1/3rd.
1/3rd of Americans are also over the age of 55, which will push that number higher.
We are consuming our young. As a 29 year old, unless technology advances radically and I have positions in the companies controlling it, I will not get what I put in.
There are many advanced economies in worse positions. France for example spends ~15% of it's total GDP on pensions alone.
We can all blame whatever severely rich people exist, however the death by a thousand cuts brought on by too few supporting too many is the root of the issue.
The worst part is, many of these supported elderly aren't even able to live decent lives.
Social Security isn’t federal spending. People pay into the trust fund, then withdraw when they retire. It is set up so that it cannot run a deficit.
However, congress raided the social security fund, spent the money, and now they are deflecting blame away from themselves by claiming the system was insolvent by design.
If you're referring to social security, that money is not free at all. People pay into the system for 40-50 years so they can get a fraction of it back in retirement.
Regarding college inflation, that's purely caused by young people taking out loans. Don't do that. My kid is taking a good number of his classes at the community college. If y'all started shopping for the cheapest way to get an education, costs would come down.
If that happened en masse then the universities you ultimately want to attend will start requiring their courses and not accepting transfer credits or something else. Not saying it’s a bad idea or anything to take classes and then transfer them in.
1. At least in the US, contributions to social security stop once you hit 160k, making it a regressive tax. Raise that cap and like magic, the system is solvent.
2. Growing home prices come from a lack of supply. And you’ve completely flattened an entire generation into one wealth class, which is a gross distortion of the facts.
That doesn't make it "regressive". The untaxed dollars after 160k don't count towards benefits.
Rather, the tax is extremely progressive due to the various "bends". As you contribute more into the system, they make the per-dollar value of your contributions go from .9 to .3 to .15.
Anyway, Social Security is fine. It's Medicare/Medicaid that's going to nuke the budget.
The payroll tax is an income tax with the following brackets:
0-147k: 12.4%
147k+: 0%
The number goes down at the higher income bracket, which means you pay less % of your money in payroll taxes the more you make. That is the very definition of regressive.
Those aren’t the only tax brackets high earners are subject to. Aggregate tax load is roughly still progressive.
That aside, as a matter of policy, uncapping the taxes would destroy the popular notion that the amount of Social Security you receive reflects your contributions. If the public believed it was literally just income tax, and if there was no cap there would be no reason to not just adjust the income tax by that amount, it would be subject to the same politics as income taxes and could be cut on a whim. Treating it differently than income taxes, even when it is not, is essential for its survival. If they didn’t cap it, top income tax rates would be >60%, and there isn’t much appetite for that.
I'm sorry but I've contributed a fuckload of money to this system and I better be getting the value I paid for out of it when it comes to that time. These people are not 'consumers'
> with the oldest generations owning the vast majority of wealth and real estate, and with college, housing, and many costs of living having inflated 3-20x since the older generations were younger, it is a problem.
This is one "benefit" of inflation. Whatever you did 50 years ago in exchange for your wealth isn't worth as much to society today as it was back then, in general. So you can continue to do something productive or hope you were productive enough before you retired that your compensation lasts.
It's less about wealth of the oldest generation and more about the fact that we don't have a good replacement rate from reproduction or immigration. Birth rates around the world are not even at replacement rates. The entire retirement system is built on the idea that younger workers will chip in to pay for the elderly, but...we can't do that at scale, because there won't be enough people. There are still a lot of older poor people now, and caring for them and end of life care is incredibly expensive. Even "rich" people now will be poor by the time they die, especially in the US. A huge portion of US inheritance will evaporate paying for parents aging.
As populations age into a higher percentage of retirees, the system is forced to cope with a more people who are purely consumers, but contribute nothing to the system.
Also interesting that the inflationary effect of this phenomenon is starting to be recognized. A large fraction of the population has nothing to do but sit around spending money. I'd never considered this point before now, but hopefully the Fed takes it into account when they decide how much to hose the rest of us with high interest rates (which the Boomers also DGAF about.)
The problem isn't that retirees spent too much money. Most money gets spent by people in middle age who have kids, active income and no choice but spend the money. Retirees typically try to be prudent. This is why you see the large export numbers with comparatively low imports in countries with low birth rates in parts of Asia and Europe. Very productive people with no kids spending little of their money and soon stopping to contribute and cut down on spending to brace for the long haul. (source: numerous Peter Zeihan interviews and videos)
Still will lead to inflation though, as you point out, since production will drop.
I also wonder what that means for index funds and the stock market in general. Every month massive amounts of retirement savings get directed there because there is really no other place to invest. What is gonna happen when contributions turn into withdrawals?
So it's everyone's fault but... I don't get it. The system is a ponzi scheme. It was bound to have issues while benefiting the early players. Why not admit that?
Because once you're invested in a Ponzi, you lose it all when it crumbles.
It will, ineluctably, but if you can push the date further, then maybe you can get away with it.
To postpone its fate, they'll advocate for a harsher taxation of their neighbor and the business next door so they can profit from them the most ("I know they have money, while I'm so poor you know..."). They also need newcomers in the pyramid, so they advocate for more recruits.
Then they will call that "solidarity" so they don't have to face their short-term, greedy mindset, the same they blame others for.
Realistically that's what needs to happen. Wealth needs to be redistributed from the old rich to the old poor. Social Security is meant to be security for the old poor, not a middle class pension.
I thought the idea of Social Security was an insurance program to guard against you outliving your means if you live long enough, not an I-get-paid-back cash-out of your payments.
Aren't you having a fundamental misunderstanding about what the purpose of SS is?
And not sure if you know, but the dollar figures are more like:
Max pay into the program: ~$300k over your 40 year working life
(if you maxed out the contribution cap, 6% tax on $167k currently)
Max payout from the program: ~$600k
(if you draw the maximum when you retire and luckily live a long time, ~20 years)
Not "paying in $1m, and only getting $200k", by a long shot.
I think it's quite in the opposite direction of how you think you're being taken for a ride.
The Social Security tax rate is 12.4%, not 6%. The “employer contribution” exists solely as a mechanism to obfuscate how much tax is being taken out of people’s paychecks to pay for it.
This was increased from ~10% to 12.4% in 1983 under the Reagan Administration. The extra funds weren't paid to beneficiaries: they were intended to build up a trust fund for future generations, but they were instead borrowed by the government for general spending, and to mask the effect of Reagan's tax cuts.
> I thought the idea of Social Security was an insurance program to guard against you outliving your means if you live long enough, not an I-get-paid-back cash-out of your payments. Is that a fundamental misunderstanding about what the purpose of SS is?
Yes, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of social security. Social security isn't insurance or an investment, it's a tax that's presented as an insurance or investment in order to make it more palatable. The social security tax rates were set with the demographics and life expectancies in mind decades ago. And now that these demographics and life expectancies have changed we'll either have to drastically increase the tax workers are paying, or drastically cut the amount that people withdraw.
I think if you call it insurance it assumes you are entitled to something, but you are not. A future government can decided to stop paying or reduce payments if they want to.
I prefer what we have here in Australia where you are required to pay money into an account that is actually yours, with a balance that you can watch grow, and that you can withdraw as you need when you retire.
Is it true that you can actually withdraw it all the day you retire to buy real estate and then the government will start giving out a pension for you? This is something I was told by some Australians.
The Age Pension is designed to support the basic living standards of older Australians. It is paid to people who meet age and residency requirements. It is targeted through the means test to those who need it most. Pension rates are indexed to ensure they keep pace with Australian price and wage increases.
If you only have the house you live in (that's more or less median) and no income (from additional rental properties | other investments) then you might qualify for a pension.
Typically people might draw on their superannuation fund to provide a weekly income for themselves although they are free to use it for their retirement plans as they see fit.
I don't know if I agree with your example figures. SS was meant to be self-funding, and lately it hasn't been. This is partially because people are living longer.
Furthermore, the decline of pensions and rise of the 401(k) has enabled Americans to blow their opportunity to save for retirement, often on things like housing and college tuition (but that's another topic).
I think that either SS needs to be THE retirement plan, or it's the 401(k). As someone who maxes out their 401(k) each year, I do not want to participate into SS. I don't want it taken out of my paycheck, because that money would otherwise go into my 401(k) (technically), which I have more control over (where it's invested), which I can draw from in case of hardship, and which I can access at 55 1/2 instead of 65.
I do think SS is a good safety net to have, and I don't necessarily want to be disqualified from it because I "opted" for a 401(k), but realistically SS payments are so low relative to the cost of living that if I found myself living on it exclusively, I'd probably be only slightly more-comfortable than if I didn't have it. It's a shitty retirement either way. You're definitely not traveling or eating out or anything like that.
Assuming you’ve got the typical HN user’s job and career trajectory, this is exactly what’s going to happen. It’s what’s going to happen to me, too. It’s what SHOULD happen. I don’t think that many people are going to be shedding tears for your financial loss.
I'm not looking for tears, believe it or not. I would like to opt-out of SS (once I have paid in a certain amount - I realize it only works when EVERYONE pays in), and put that money in my IRA instead.
In order to pay $1M into social security you would need to make the maximum contribution for 45 years.
In order to pay $1M into social security and see less than $200k back you would need to die less than three years after starting to collect social security (assuming you don't retire early, which you probably didn't with a 45 year long career).
You can't collect SS until you are 65, 65 - 45 = 20, most people are employed by 20.
There are probably more people who pay more into SS than they get back, than you think, whether they make it to age 68 or not. Many Americans don't even make it to 65 because they had a heart attack at 58... So yes I would agree that the odds of you not making it to 68 but making it to 65, are low, but even at 68 you're still way way underwater vs what you paid in over your career.
To assume I'm one of those types just from that tiny comment... Jeez it's math. Why do I have to pay way more into my retirement than I am going to get back? I don't mind my taxes going towards others' retirement, but why does the beating have to be so brutal and severe? Why can't I pay $200k in and then opt out of SS and start putting that SS tax into my IRA?
If you're talking about US social security, your premiums are capped and your payout is directly linked to your contribution. Not sure how you could ever put $1M in of your own money over an entire career.
Do the math but ignore inflation (because the cap and payment is indexed to inflation)
If you work 30 years at $150,000 per year, you've put in 6.2% per year ($9,300) or a total of $280,000 (your employer put in another $280,000). You can't contribute more than that, since income above ~$150,000 is exempt from the social security tax.
Assume a 3% real return, your contribution turns into $500,000 plus the employers $500,000, so $1M.
If you get the max payment (because you put in the max contribution), you'll get $3,627 per month or $43,524 per year. If you retire at 65 and die at 95, you would have drawn over $1.3M. That's more than what you put in.
I'm not sure where the "rip off" is? I guess it is if you die early, but hey, that's how pensions work.
It's not a zero-sum game. You pay, you receive back all the benefits of a developed society AND the retirement. Otherwise you could keep all your money and live alone in a jungle or desert.
> Giving old people money for free when their 10x more valuable houses inflate the market
Aside from that money not being "free", the important part of your observation is on the housing price and how the market works I think. These are IMO way more important issues than wether elderlies should work until 65 or 95.
The good example of the extreme skew is Japan, when government optimizes their policies in favor of old people at the expense of young people who can't even influence the policy enough.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted. At least in the US Social Security is a benefits program like Medicare, Medicaid, Snap, etc. It has special accounting rules for Congress but that’s about the only difference.
It’s not a forced retirement savings scheme where you “pay into” it. At anytime Congress can change what the benefits are and the only reason it hadn’t happened yet is because it’s such a popular welfare program.
I am trying to understand this. What were the mini tens of thousands of dollars I paid to the federal government over a period of 40 years in the form of Social Security taxes then?
They were paid to other retirees at the time. Some excess dollars were loaned to the government for general spending, which put Treasury bonds into the "social security trust fund." You in turn received credit that entitles you to receive similar payments when you retire, paid for by then-working taxpayers and by repayment of those bonds (which also comes from tax revenue.) As other posters mention, the democratically-elected government could change the law so you aren't paid those benefits: if that bothers you, you should avoid voting for politicians that want to change the arrangement.
Just so you know, I would be happy to end the arrangement, even though it would mean losing my Social Security benefits, which I should come into soon. I think it’s a terrible system. I am just having trouble understanding your terminology.
His terminology makes sense and it hits directly to the core of the problem: It's a ponzi scheme. These people were not saving into "retirements". They were giving their money, freely, for other people in the expectation that the next generation will do the same.
The same thing is true of your investment account. When you buy bonds you're giving money to a company or the US Treasury who then spend it. That money is gone. You're assuming the borrower will choose pay you back from some future revenue stream. When you buy into a stock IPO you're betting that the company will pay you dividends from a future revenue stream (or do related things that make the stock perceived as valuable.) In the case of Social Security that future revenue stream is taxes drawn from the US taxpayer. None of this is a Ponzi scheme.
Social security has always been simply a means-tested welfare program like any other we have in the US. The tax to to support it the same thing - just an income tax to balance out the budget.
I wouldn't describe myself has having "paid in" to SNAP, or disaster relief funds, etc. Just as I wouldn't describe myself as having "paid in" to social security. I simply paid an income tax at the time like any other. If I'm lucky, when I'm in need some other poor sap will be paying it forward as well.
Social Security taxes are just ordinary income taxes, no different than the rest of the income taxes you may have paid. It does not entitle you to anything.
It's a tax. That money is spent and gone. You no longer have any claim on it. If you live long enough, you may get to claim tax money paid by other workers, but that has nothing to do with what you were taxed.
You don't have a "Social Security" balance that you can eventually withdraw from in retirement. SS taxes just go into the general government budget, and the future retirement benefits they are theoretically associated with can be modified or rescinded at any moment. The odds of any 20s-30s-year-old--who is currently contributing funds to the Social Security scheme--eventually receiving Social Security checks to the tune of those that boomers are receiving today is virtually zero. It is simply a fiscal impossibility.
> As populations age into a higher percentage of retirees, the system is forced to cope with a more people who are purely consumers, but contribute nothing to the system.
Sort of off topic, but I do agree that the older generations in the western world, particularly the american baby boomers, act sociopathic as a group. There is a good book about this: A generation of sociopaths. [1]
Sad to watch an entire generation hate their children and grandchildren (if they even have them). Believe me, I do not enjoy painting an entire group of people with a shit-stained brush, but it is what it is and it should be called out.
This being any sort of ‘tit-for-tat’ response is coincidentally a pretty ‘boomer’ take on mental health.
Anxiety can be (and is often) situational, and anxious situations can be a catalyst for general anxiety disorder, etc. I’m not gonna sit here and pretend to know what it’s like to be an average income earning millennial, even though I am a millennial. But the fact that I’m sitting here on my nice fat tech worker salary (after still finding it quite hard to buy a house), supporting my partner who is studying and working part-time, and am still feeling the pinch of inflation, makes me completely sympathise with those earning less than me that are surely freaking the fuck out.
This is an ageist perspective and foundational to what you've written. Older people have a lot to contribute and it's unmeasured.
The same goes for partners who stay at home with young people instead of working. They're DEEPLY contributing without pay.
You're going after old people in a faux-scarcity world. How about you take on the collective issues, like capitalism choosing to gatekeep resources behind labor?
Their perspective also ignores the fact that previous generations built the world that current and future generations continue to develop. We all stand on the shoulders of giants…
First of all, you don't freaking need your own new house to start a family. In most countries most people never buy a new house.
Second, wealth is not zero-sum, there isn't a magic pot of gold redistributed between people. As value and demand are added to the economy, so is wealth because the new young people with demands can provide skills or time to be used in value creation and then they also (and older folks that are not creating value because they are not working) can consume and create demand which defines the amount of wealth they create. Poor old people are a net negative but rich old people create demand and thus wealth for value creating youth, unless of course they have everything they need and live in the woods or something. But even poor old people need to eat and have health care demands that young people provide.
The forest you are missing for the trees here is the greed of corporations who are not increasing wages to keep up with not just inflation but the value young people are creating. Things like labor unions are a joke in the US and politicians need corporations like fish need water. So the profit margins of companies and the wealth of shareholders is increasing as a result of the young people who are creating that wealth and giving it away to them because they can't collectively bargain and say they want fair pay. as individuals they can be replaced easily if they don't like the compensation.
So this whole old people vs young people and millenials destroying things and boomers hoarding wealth and all that is bullshit.
The education in the US is shit, you can't compete in a global economy and keep up with wealth creation as a result (still at the top but getting closer to stagnation). And the US is essentially and oligarchy at this point. The richest country in the world and it is the rich share holding class that only care about amassing enough wealth that their descendants will make it through whatever shit the country goes through, so they don't care how much americans suffer or get robbed in day light.
This comes down to democracy being a game of information. Whoever controls information controls democracy and this means two things, education and media. You have so many idiots even young ones fall for the trump bullshit because of education and media/social media bubbles and it isn't an accident that education is shit either, it isn't an accident that racism and xenophobia and other hateful things are the tools the ruling class uses to manange democracy.
America embraced greed as a way of life and the greedy rule and we are finding out why greed is evil in all forms as If we are part of a fable people will tell their children ages from now to teach them to avoid greed and pride.
But not all hope is lost, information and disinformation are education and self education are still popular thanks to the internet. Americans need to pursue truth and justice and fight evil because nothing built on lies and evil lasts.
Democracy can still work, but if the voters embrace greed, the the result is what you see. Ask most americans what they think of basic welfare and they'll tell you it's just black people being lazy and taking from the government (in reality it is mostly not black people but why does race matter at all?). We all know greed and hated are wrong, we can't blame corporations and politicians when we choose hatred and greed, these things must be adressed before you can change the way things are done and have fair wages and a stable democracy and solve so many other major issues in the US.
Forgive the long post, let me know if you disagree.
If we removed the electoral college in the US, or if voting day were a national holiday, all those issues would automatically be addressed.
The old and conservative make too powerful a voting block, and it perpetuates every corporate, oligarchic, xenophobic greed cycle one could point to as a rot in our system. I don't think old people are bad because they're just taking government money and have big fancy houses, but largely they do vote the same way and that way they are voting is causing problems.
> First of all, you don't freaking need your own new house to start a family. In most countries most people never buy a new house.
It's important to understand the similarities and differences between "need" and "precipitates conditions that massively increase the chance of", when it comes to demographic trends.
The "all problems will be solved if all my political policies are implemented" seems to be a fairly insidious strain of authoritarianism that is infecting the progressives.
'insidious authoritarianism' is a curious way of describing two not-unreasonable proposals that are presumably aimed at making american democracy more representative and accessible...
> The old and conservative make too powerful a voting block, and it perpetuates every corporate, oligarchic, xenophobic greed cycle one could point to as a rot in our system. I don't think old people are bad because they're just taking government money and have big fancy houses, but largely they do vote the same way and that way they are voting is causing problems.
You must have missed the part where they referred to human beings who they disagree with as "a rot in our system". The fact that you're apparently blind to such toxic rhetoric isn't surprising--it is increasingly common among progressives.
I believe you may have misread. They weren’t calling any specific group of humans a rot in our system. They said they believe a specific and overly powerful voting bloc perpetuates every corporate, oligarchic, xenophobic greed cycle one could point to as a rot in our system.
It’s not the voting humans who are labeled as the rot, it’s the cycles that result from the exercise of that bloc’s outsized voting power—as said in the second part of your quoted excerpt: “… that way they are voting is causing problems.”
I’m not suggesting the original wording was great and non-toxic, but I don’t think the poster said what you interpreted them as saying.
That fairly insidious strain of authoritarianism isn’t infecting progressives alone, sadly. Nor is it infecting progressives more. The “all problems will be solved if all my political policies are implemented” argument appears to be the starting line of most vocalized political positions.
I see this suggestion a lot, but I struggle to understand what problem it's expected to solve. It certainly wouldn't help voter turn-out. Most service sector jobs (the kind where it's hard to get a couple of hours off to vote) require you to work more on national holidays, not less. It's mostly the relatively voting friendly office jobs that give the day off for a national holiday.
you don't need to make it a holiday, just doing it on a weekend should suffice. E.g. in Australia, elections, Federal, state and local are all held on Saturdays.
If you actually want to improve turnout, enact compulsory voting. That is much better, but still no silver bullet to electing sane competent and not corrupt politicians.
>If we removed the electoral college in the US, or if voting day were a national holiday, all those issues would automatically be addressed.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
>The old and conservative make too powerful a voting block, and it perpetuates every corporate, oligarchic, xenophobic greed cycle one could point to as a rot in our system. I don't think old people are bad because they're just taking government money and have big fancy houses, but largely they do vote the same way and that way they are voting is causing problems.
You seem to be making an assumption that rich old people can consume their wealth. I suspect the reality is that they cannot and in many cases are obligate savers. This creates a problem for the economy as individuals may lack the capital to start new businesses, innovate, or grow the next generation.
Having a nation of renters renting from rich old oligarchs is not efficient. some redistribution may be necessary.
But a lot of times it's invested in the economy to the worker's detriment. Look at the huge investments into real estate recently. Are the new landlords going to price units at something remotely affordable for someone on part-time minimum wage to raise a family in like it's still the 50's, or are they going to charge an unaffordable market rate? Resulting in people living with roommates into their 30's and beyond. More active participation in the market by the government would do wonders - real estate developers are in business to make money, which is what's lead to so many luxury condos. The government is able to pay market rate to blue collar workers who actually do the construction while not taking any profit, and thus are about to build units that are affordable by plebeians.
Another example of socially irresponsible investing is in any company that hires minimum wage employees for 39.5 hours a week, just under what's needed to qualify for company-sponsored health insurance. The market's slowly changing, but you're deluded if you think that's not still happening and that corporations are just happen to make small accidental practices that result in wage theft from employees, especially those at the bottom rungs.
There are bourgeoisie who pride themselves on their philanthropic work, and socially responsible investing, but greed's a more reliable driver for how people invest.
The money isn’t sitting in a vault - but it also isn’t necessarily being consumed. In order to leave the vault it must be invested or more typically loaned. As the vault earns interest, a dynamic can emerge that consumers must borrow progressively larger sums in order to avoid bankruptcy.
This occurred in the Great Depression where inequality rose and in turn debt loads. The fed has papered over this problem by simply printing more money. However historically, the US faired better following the massive federal wealth redistribution that was ww2.
The US government can’t afford ww2 style spending programs, and increasing evidence shows that money printing isn’t helping the economy.
> In order to leave the vault it must be invested or more typically loaned.
Which it is. All of it, except for the reserve requirement. The idea that wealthy people hoard money is simply not true. The money is put back to work in the economy.
Land is zero sum. The easy (partial) solution to that is just to build more housing on the same land, except older homeowners spend their time blocking new housing, which has essentially turned housing into a zero sum market as well.
> greed of corporations who are not increasing wages
Increasing wages will do nothing if those wages end up chasing the same fixed amount of housing/land.
Now, people are going to point out that the US is a big country and there's lots of land and so on. And that's true, but a lot of the economic growth and opportunity is concentrated in the cities where housing growth is being blocked. The same problem occurs in Canada (and a few other Western developed countries too).
Your message is wrong on so many levels I don't really know how to start.
First, average life expectancy is absolutely not an interesting measure. You should at least look at the average age up to which people are alive and in good health. And this is much lower. Also, life expectancy is very different depending on your social class. Construction workers die much younger than software engineers. And this is even more true regarding life expectancy in good health. By increasing the age at which one can retire, what you actually do is to make the poorer contribute to retirement money they won't be able to benefit of because they'll be dead before or soon after while the rich will enjoy their retirement since they live longer in good health.
Concerning the whole there is more old people thing: yes, there is, but at the same time workers have never been as productive as they're now. And France as never been as rich as it is now. There is no technical problem here, just a political choice. The Cor (Conseil d'orientation des retraites, which is the official institution that studies retirement in France with projections into the future etc) says our retirement system is currently stable with no real risk to its equilibrium (actually there is one scenario over four in which it may temporarily have a deficit in a few years but that resorbs itself over a few years as well — and you have to know that a few years back they made projections and were quite pessimistic for the situation today, but the reality is that nowadays our retirement system is afloat and well, with multiple billions in positive this year for example). Also, there are solutions if we need more contribution to retirement fund: one of which is to increase wages, another one of which is to pay women the same as men (in France the gap is still between 15% and 20%), another one is to tax the richest more, or simply to politically accept to keep the portion of GDP we spend on the elderly the same rather than wanting to keep the absolute amount the same or lower (which is what Macron wants).
Finally, retirement pension is not "giving people money for free". Retired people are not "just consumers", they contribute a lot to society, even if from a capitalist point of view it is not directly visible: more than a third of the volunteering in (quite sadly, indispensable) non-profit is done by young retirees who can still do it, almost half of baby-sitting is done by grand-parents who can do it because they're retired, etc.
What kills the livelyhoods of younger generation is small wages, no political control over rent prices, a partly artificial inflation which main effect is to make everyone pay more at the supermarket to enrich shareholders who bet on the inflation even more, and soon, if this law passes, it will be the burden of having to take care of their parents who could not work til the increased retirement minimum age for health reasons and will therefore have way too small pensions to be independent.
So a lot of people will label you a conservative because that is a conservative take but I've come to understand that you're simply American and your views are normative for an American. American normative positions are inherently right-wing.
Corporate profits in the US amount to about $10T/year [1]. You can and should view this as an estimate of the surplus value of labor that is being extracted. This amounts to $36,000 for every adult (~275M) in the US per year.
We could absolutely afford an unimaginable increase of standard of living for retirees and workers. We simply choose not to.
As populations age into a higher percentage of retirees, the system is forced to cope with more people who are purely consumers, and contribute nothing to the system. In a post-scarcity world, this would not be a problem, but currently with the oldest generations owning the vast majority of wealth and real estate, and with college, housing, and many costs of living having inflated 3-20x since the older generations were younger, it is a problem.
Giving old people money for free when their 10x more valuable houses inflate the market, keeping the younger generation from being able to start families, is a killing blow for population growth and the livelihoods of younger generations.