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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

> Ensure we'll be able to retire.

Unfortunately virtually every developed country has raised the age of retirement to 69 or higher, and it's generally accepted that in 30 years when I retire, there will be nothing in the communal pot, so I better save my own, as well as paying into the pot so the people before me can spend it.

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>in 30 years when I retire, there will be nothing in the communal pot.

I assume you mean Social Security. Over the last 30 years upper-to-high incomes have skyrocketed while the legal SSA-taxable income cap remains at $118,500.[1]

Reports of Social Security's imminent death are greatly exaggerated, and more often than not a part of a classic Neoliberal (1940s+ Neoliberalism, not the Clintonian/New Democrat brand) "starve-the-beast" plan to convince young people that the program is unsustainable and should be gutted so people can save a measly few percentage points of take-home income. It is a generations-long propaganda tactic that makes sense if you don't think too hard but the simple fact is that raising the cap modestly will keep Social Security solvent for a very long time.

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/planners/maxtax.html

I'm ashamed I didn't know the origin, definition of neoliberalism. Ignorant me thought it was something like "new-liberalism" even though it was used in contexts where maybe something like "libertarian fruitopian Freedom Markets (tm) Murica!" seemed more appropriate.

TIL neoliberalism means laissez faire economic liberalization a la Reagonomics and Thatcherism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

People also live longer. Social security (retirement) was never intended to support people for 30-40 years. The age has to go up with the life expectancy to keep it solvent.

the life expectancy for blue collar and low income white collar workers has sadly kept steady.

Is that really the case?

"What’s remarkable, however, is how much life expectancy increased between 1990 and 2010 in counties of all poverty levels"

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/05/the...

Those results disagree strongly with the most recent JAMA paper on the topic:

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/11/11405954/health-life-expectancy...

The 2000-2010 increase in your source is ~2 years for the poorest men and ~1 year for the poorest women. The 2001-2014 increase in my source is ~.3 for poor men and ~0 for poor women.

That seems like a really big gap, and I don't have a good way to reconcile them.

Over what time period? Life expectancy has grown continuously except for a few dips over the years.

Yes, but the growth for the poorest people (not blue collar workers, the poorest 5%) has been tiny-to-flat over the last 15 years. Well, according to one good looking study, I've seen wildly divergent results in this thread alone.

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/11/11405954/health-life-expectancy...

The poorest 5%, presumably people who had little to no employment in their lives, would not be getting much in the way of social security retirement benefits anyway.

Disability or other welfare, maybe, but that would be different.

The 'communal pot' in the United States is actually 'broad taxation of 5% GDP of one of the strongest, most stable economies in the history of the planet'. Social Security maybe won't be as much as estimated today, but it assuredly will be around unless the United States economy totally collapses— and if that happens, all your savings will be for naught anyway.

Or, I suppose, if people listen to fearmongering about how 'Social Security won't be there' and get rid of it. But old people do vote a lot, so that's relatively unlikely.

Its generally accepted that unless there are changes there will be nothing in the communal pot.

Eventually, politicians will do something. I doubt millions of older, and therefore voting people will just accept there is nothing left.

Hmm yes like they'll never accept college is unaffordable, or health care is unaffordable, or real estate is unaffordable, or there's not enough blue collar jobs for decades, not enough white collar jobs more recently, not enough civil service jobs, etc. Doormats will be doormats. This is not the generation that stormed Iwo Jima, or whatever.

You're talking about progress, which is mostly ignored. He's talking about regression, which voters hate.

Tell people college is 300% too expensive and they'll sigh and agree. Tell them you're cutting 2% from income they're already promised, and they'll picket in the streets.

Depends on which streets you're talking about. I live in a liberal college town in already-high-tax NY. We bitch and moan and cut another slice of artisan cheese from Wegmans before remembering that we live in a town with an educated population, an efficient and responsive local government with effective public services, plenty of parks, and one of the best public high schools in the United States.

You get what you pay for. I pay a lot in taxes, and I get a lot back.

College age people don't vote, so they don't get nice handouts. Retirement age people do, so they do. They even get socialized medicine which is supposedly "impossible" for the rest of us.

I can't find a single country that has raised to to 69 let alone "virtually every developed country"

Finland has 68 already and two will raise it to 68 eventually (Ireland and UK)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement_age

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