There are enough Baby Boomers to dominate politics, compared to so called Gen-X and the Millennials will one day soon be the dominant demographic so for people like me, when we were young, the older people stomped on us and when we're old, the younger people will stomp on us.
It's such a ludicrous statement.
Are the rest of us on variable incomes which we can scale up and down at will?
Social Security is adjusted for inflation: https://www.ssa.gov/news/cola/
Likewise bond yields and stock prices will change with inflation/deflation.
Any retirement scheme not adjusted for inflation is a rip-off at best and a scam at worst.
Which makes it fixed in real terms.
> Any retirement scheme not adjusted for inflation is a rip-off at best and a scam at worst.
Fixed (in nominal terms) annuities are not-infrequently used as retirement vehicles (and many pensions are either fixed or have less-than-full COLAs.)
So where is the problem? Inflation adjusted income has barely increased at all for anyone but the top 20% of earners since the mid-1960s: http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Household-...
> Fixed (in nominal terms) annuities are not-infrequently used as retirement vehicles
Which is why annuities are almost always a rip-off.
Whether or not its a "problem", that is an explanation of why it is an accurate description of the scenario faced by the group in question, and a useful label.
> Inflation adjusted income has barely increased at all for anyone but the top 20% of earners since the mid-1960s
Its barely increased for the averages of segments of the income distribution. That doesn't mean individuals don't see income growth over time (and even move between, e.g., income quintiles), it just means that (except in the top ranges) the overall distribution isn't moving up.
That's an important issue, to be sure, but its a different issue that individuals on fixed incomes and the impacts specific policies, etc., may have on the, distinct from the rest of the population which makes it useful to identify and discuss them as a group with a label.
Property taxes are a potential wildcard which is one reason why increases are often capped--which isn't popular with the "they should just move out" crowd.
Are you on an income which is, by law, tied to changes in the Consumer Price Index? That's how Social Security works. From the 2016 benefit letters:
"The law does not permit an increase in benefits when there is no increase in the cost of living. So your benefit will stay the same in 2016. There was no increase in the cost of living during the past year based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) published by the Department of Labor."
So maybe "pegged", as in "pegged to an index", would have been a better idiom, but we're probably stuck with "fixed".
Social security is fixed real income. Annuities are fixed nominal income.
If you're retired and possibly chronically ill you have little opportunity to do such things.
Abundant cheap housing and the GI bill were a pretty sweet deal - despite the hardships that it took to get there.
I'm anxious to see when the IOTA Party starts gaining momentum - the one that stands for "It's Our Turn, Arses" and aims to pass legislation catering to the Millenial generation more than the Boomers.
When you talk to leadership in both parties the line is not, "Online voting isn't ready", its, "America isn't ready for online voting."
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY
Not that I don't think there is way to get the best of both worlds. I'm sure there's a way for us to vote without having our votes be made public, so things like vote buying and voter intimidation can't happen, especially with blockchain technology. Or perhaps those factors won't matter as much any more, and are actually acceptable factors when compared to voter suppression through poorly placed and managed polling locations. Either way, it's not as simple as it may seem.
Any reading links to share?
If we make votes personally identifiable, we can resolve this problem.
FWIW
I hear this again and again and again and its utter bullshit.
You don't need to solve auditing to solve online voting. They are two separate issues and I guarantee once you HAVE online voting there will be no shortage of solutions to audit it.
When the voter expresses this on a physical ballot, that chain of trust is intact. They know the record of their vote is accurate.
Audits of this, taking the vote to court, etc... is all possible. Machine assists work well from there, and do not generally present a problem.
Oregon and other states do this with vote by mail. It works, and electronic means help with registration, and the state does auto registration too. Changes, ballot tracking, validation, party registration are all super easy and robust.
When we move that vote to a machine captured intent, the voter lacks that chain of trust. They cannot know their vote contributed to the tally, unless votes are personally identifiable somehow.
Bringing records into court, etc... are all problematic as well.
That chain of trust is foundational to the overall validity of the process.
We don't really need e voting. What we do need is improved focus on transparent, efficient, trustworthy processes.
It is untrustworthy sorry.
Oregon is really simple, turnout great, registration automatic, etc... Things like A/B testing aren't needed, and most importantly, the voter knows the actual record of their vote contributes to the tally. Every voter gets all they need, and ample time to vote as well.
Unless we want personally identifiable votes, the system you describe cannot do that in a trustworthy way.
And having that trust in the record be true matters a whole lot more. This matter isn't bullshit. Having that basic trust in place is at the core of democracy. Participation does not require surrendering that trust either.
That is solved by actually educating people and not putting things in their way. The Oregon system does both those things. Outreach and education comes from parents and concerned others, until they come of age, at which point the State does this.
We don't need e voting. It's a solution in search of a problem.
Most of our systems are very corrupt and voter hostile. It is very tempting to apply technology to circumvent that. But, the truth is that same corruption will take advantage of the lack of trust and forced ambiguity inherent in electronic voting records that are not personally identifiable.
We have already seen this happen here in the US and other parts of the world. Voter trust in the actual record of their vote used for the tally is fundemental to trustworthy elections.
Cost is not a factor in this. It never is, unless hostile interests are successful in making it an issue. They have done so, and untrustworthy election processes dominate US elections too.
E voting does nothing to resolve what is a human corruption problem.
More in a bit...
Now, contrast that with a platform that directly says something like this:
"We aim to create legislation and change laws to benefit you, and odds are your parents or anybody over the age of 50 aren't going to like what we propose because it's good for you, even if it's not good for older people. They had 40 years of voting and they voted everything for themselves - well, we've paid attention and we're going to use that manual to reset the lay of the land a little."
From there, policy and platform papers can be constructed with moderate (capping interest on student loans as % of income) or extreme (Federal Income Tax penalties for anyone working over the age of 55) or batshit crazy (de-fund the DEA).
It's somewhere to start, because the apathy is kind of what the political system counts on from the youth.
"...backed by the full faith and credit of United states Government."
The boomers don't dominate politics; money does.
The 0.1% is trying to drive a wedge between young and old (largely successfully) by pushing this boomer/millennial bullshit (for one example of blatant astroturfing, google "the can kicks back").
They've been doing this to get complicity from the old to ramp up student debt, keep wages for the young down, etc.
Equally, they've been doing this to get complicity from the young to privatize social security and slash medicare (thus far unsuccessful but boy have they been trying).
The worst part is that it's an utterly shallow and obvious self serving strategy that's very clearly working (look at all the 'boomer hate' on HN. Getting people to hate on their grandmas is depressingly easy).
The last thing the 0.1% want to see is young and old united against them.
I'm not trying to justify that kind of behavior, only pointing out that if the system is a certain way, there is a reason why many people behave the way they do.
"Fixed incomes" does not refer to the fact that they are at the cuurent limit and could not currently do better(which is how you seem to be interpreting it), but rather that it is fixed over time, with no prospect of increase. For many seniors, this is the case at least in real terms (i.e., considering inflation). Many seniors income is dominated by things that are either fixed in nominal terms (and thus shrink when, as is usually the case, inflation is positive), or which are adjusted only for inflation (which are fixed in real terms, even though they grow in nominal terms.) That is, over time, their income is either fixed or declining in real terms.
Hourly wages in the US have, on average, grown slower than inflation since the 1970s.
Pensions are another simmering shitstorm on the horizon.