Comment by cmurf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmurf | Hacker News Reader

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That's amusing. I'm 45 and said the same thing when I was in my mid-20's. And now I think it's just naive. The most docile 60 year olds I know become positively vitriolic at the idea of even the age of benefit payout being changed by 5 years. If Social Security were just done away with, I guarantee you the violent revolution they'd be considering wouldn't involve clever devices that take people's heads off cleanly, quickly and painlessly like the French did. Vlad the Impaler would be seen as a massage therapist in comparison.

So if Social Security (and don't forget Medicare it's part of the same FICA taxation) were to go away, it definitely means some nasty calamity happened first, like Yellowstone or a meteor just blew up half the country, in which case we've got other problems.

The thing to be concerned about is privatizing it. That's a con game to dump a shit ton of money into the stock market, with the ensuing distortion inflating the stock prices of the very wealthy. It's about helping them. It doesn't do squat to help the people who will depend on Social Security. They will not make more money. And just like with getting rid of it, there's no way it's tenable to tolerate the inevitable short term loss of asset value with recessions. We can't have retirees experiencing 5% let alone 20% loss of income for 1 month let alone 1 year let alone 5-8 years for a recovery. Old people would sooner pick up axes and make you shoot them, because shooting your grandma in the head is kinder than this Republican privatization of Social Security nonsense. Grandma is not going to go back to dumpster diving and living under a bridge again like the 1930's.

And you've got the same financial concern with an unbalanced 401K - that could leave you in a lurch the same way a privatized Social Security plan can. So take the risks in that 401k while you're young, but at some point probably in your 50's, you'll want to start moving it to inflation indexed treasuries.

Young people right now are more likely to be savers, because of 2007/2008. They saw what it did to the unprepared, so they know that sort of thing can happen. Gen X and the Baby Boomers didn't have anything nearly that scary.

> The most docile 60 year olds I know become positively vitriolic at the idea of even the age of benefit payout being changed by 5 years.

I guess I'm afraid of a slow rollout. ie. everyone who's 40 and older gets normal social security, if you're ~35 now, you'll have to wait a few years more. It's exactly the kind of "we got ours" BS that the boomers are so known for.

Honestly, I don't think its such a bad idea. Life expectancy in 1935 was 62. Today its 79. So if we want the program to be solvent, we have to adopt one or more of the following solutions: keep increasing the SS-eligibility age in tandem with life expectancy, increase the FICA tax, cut benefits

You could also choose what the U.S. is choosing now, which is to reduce U.S. life expectancy.

Grandfathering would be unjust though.

I mean, the FICA taxes were increased in 1983 in part as preparation for the Boomer's retirement. When that bubble is past us, we shouldn't need to increase again for a couple generations, even accounting for increased average lifespan.

Dependency ratios (the number of workers compared to the number of people dependent on workers) may actually be lower than they were in the 60s simply because fewer people are having children.

Even if that weren't true, the idea that we have to keep putting the age up is predicated upon productivity remaining static.

Productivity has gone up consistently and will likely continue to go up.

Curiously some people are breathlessly optimistic about automation when it's a convenient scapegoat for high unemployment but immediately lose all faith in it when it comes to social security projections. These people probably don't have our best interests at heart.

You left out adding more people into the system, although that's usually considered in the context of demography rather than mortality. One accounting reason to consider it from this perspective, though, is that adult immigrants have typically been raised and educated at some other country's expense so their productive entry to the US workforce is free of any debt overhang, ie no public monies were spent by the US on educating so they're basically coming to help out with the national debt for free. Of course the flip side of this is a brain drain for countries that see too many people leave.

This is already the case, since 1983. Also note that there's a huge difference in the payout depending on whether you go for early or full benefit age. https://www.nasi.org/learn/socialsecurity/retirement-age

> It's exactly the kind of "we got ours" BS that the boomers are so known for.

The boomers are just recipients of an anomalous post-war economic order that heavily benefitted the US for a couple decades.

The average 60-year old had no role in pulling the rug out from millennials.

Right. The average Boomer had nothing to do with it. To be fair, the Boomer politicians and business managers didn't screw the Millennials, either. Not directly. They pulled the rug out from the Gen-Xers, and let the domino effect take out the Millennials, too. Yeah, as a generation, we still exist, even though nobody talks about us.

The Boomers were the beneficiaries of post-war prosperity, but they also decided to steal money from the future to finance their generational party/gravy train. The Greatests gave them a gift of some free money, but then they also decided to smash open their own childrens' and grandchildrens' piggy banks and fill them full of promissory notes. Except they aren't IOUs that are promises from the parents to pay their kids back. They are UOMEs that obligate the kids to pay their parents more money, if they ever actually get some.

I'm biased by anecdote, because I'm old enough to have seen typical (late) Boomer lifestyles and compare them to typical Gen X lifestyles in the same age range. In other words, I'm old enough now to compare my own life with that of my parents when they were the age I am now.

> The Boomers were the beneficiaries of post-war prosperity, but they also decided to steal money from the future to finance their generational party/gravy train.

I hear this a lot, but what exactly do you mean?

The real reason we don't have the same great lifestyles our (let's be honest - mostly white, male) parents and grandparents did is because no one can get a good paying factory job right out of high school anymore - an inevitable, global, structural change that no one could've prevented.

It's also because they consistently cut taxes and public investment in infrastructure while passing legislation to inflate the costs of basic life necessities such as housing.

I'd point to the massive amounts of privatization of what was public infrastructure.

If you're into documentaries, I'd really recommend some of Adam Curtis's stuff on the topic; he covers the topics much more completely and eloquently than I.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(TV_series)

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

No - that's an important structural reason, but I dispute your claim that it's the overarching economic factor or that it's entirely out of our control.

I don't know about your family, but 50% of my ancestors were female.

What I mean is that as Boomers took control of government and business from the previous generation, they overwhelmingly preferred current consumption over future growth. They preferred to benefit their own generation rather than attempt to improve the lot of future generations. And in many cases, they took on a lot of public debt, spent it for private benefit, and mailed the bill ahead to the year 2030. Then they forgot to build the businesses, infrastructure, and capital investments that are absolutely required to be able to pay not just the interest, but the principal, too.

So now we get events like interstate highway bridges collapsing into the Mississippi River. But we can't have that, so instead how about we sell an interstate highway bridge to a private company and let them collect tolls on it? Then maintenance is their problem, right? Oh, and hey, we're driving cities into bankruptcy with the benefits we voted to ourselves, so let's make sure that rather than avoid the bankruptcy by stepping back some of our own foolish economic choices, we instead focus our efforts on making sure they can't discharge those future obligations when the bankruptcy happens. And when retirement benefits finally exceed the productive capacity of all the working people in the nation, the Boomers will mostly be dead already, and the Gen-Xers will be the ones stuck scavenging meals from the garbage while dodging the roving bands of Gen-Z cannibal marauders in their spiky, Mad-Max-style wasteland buggies.

It's all just exactly what can go wrong when you have too much democratic leverage in your republic. The Boomers had just enough of a numeric advantage over other generational voting blocs that they got a disproportionately large share of representation. Then they just voted themselves all the cookies out of the cookie jar.

You're right, but the many boomers have been happy to accept the benefit even while seeing the cost fall on succeeding generations, though it's hard to blame individual people from drifting along with their cohort.

Only there's now bi-partisan recognition that SS is insolvent and something must be done. The left wants to increase taxes and remove the cap, who knows how far they could get to taking that if the populist Sanders side takes over, and the right wants to reduce benefits and/or privatize. If the stagnation keeps up until retirement, I guess they'll just quit writing checks.

Social Security insolvency is a myth. https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/ProgData/fyOps.html https://www.nasi.org/research/2016/social-security-finances-...

The risk to a stable society (the purpose of Social Security, which is part of its name) is essentially zero by raising the cap.

The risk is substantial by either reducing benefits or privatizing. And I know this because the instant the conversation goes down this road the contra agent devolves to this:

I will pick a pocket first, and shoot grandma in the head second, before this nonsense of reducing benefits or privatization. Benefit reduction, a risk of which is endemic to privatization (grandma might become rich, or she might get kicked out of her apartment, who is to say except the glory of the free market), is objectively more unethical than either picking pockets or shooting old people.

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