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whathaschanged

Sweden is 'fine' and yet has to raise the retirement age to cover all the drain on their societal services?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thelocal.se/20171214/what-s...

Please.

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With life expectation rising this seems a reasonable thing to do. How else do you want to deal with this?

[deleted]

Ok. Now go ahead and implement it. Sounds like a brilliant idea nobody has thought of.

Here is a related cartoon:

http://dilbert.com/strip/1994-12-17

Stop allowing a flood on migrants for no reason other than a feel good policy. Social safety nets exist for the populace that contributes over time, not for new fully grown males to suddenly appear with or without families expecting benefits they and their predecessors never contributed to. Down votes show HNs continued ignorance to actual world situations.

Can you provide some numbers showing that the increase is due to those migrants?

That's fine for people who work desk jobs. But manual laborers tend to accumulate a variety of chronic injuries as they age. So increasing the retirement age means more of them will be forced to go out on disability pay instead of being able to retire with dignity.

Disability doesn't have to violate your dignity. That's a US problem. You can also give early retirement to people who can't work anymore. But in general something has to be adjusted for people getting older. It's simple math.

This is wrong. It's not needed because people are getting older, it's needed because the increase in productivity is not enough to cover expenses for long-lived retirees and other groups. If Sweden was 20% more productive, perhaps they could afford to just have longer and happier retirements. And if it was, say, 50% more productive, they could cut work week to 15 hours or decrease retirement age. Alternatively, they could cut other expenses (for example, stop bringing in more refugees) and still afford fixed retirement age. This "simple math" is not inherently linked to longevity of the Swedish elderly, it's the budget constraints that matter.

Edit: given that bringing up refugees invites downvoting, I want to clarify that this may not be among the major causes of Sweden's decision to raise retirement age (and is not the core idea of my message), but it's not negligible either: according to this guy http://voxeu.org/article/fiscal-cost-refugees-europe , current immigration policy costs Sweden 1,35% of annual GDP.

Don't forget that the benefits from most productivity increases have been going to a few capitalists over the last decades and any further increase will probably be absorbed by them too. If this had gone to workers or retirement funds they probably could keep the retirement age steady.

It's also important to distinguish between refugees versus other types of immigrants. Many of the people who have entered Sweden recently from Africa and the Middle East are just seeking a better life, and I sympathize with their situation, but legally speaking they aren't refugees.

But at the same time, the average life expectancy has also increased at a similar rate.

Edit: Adding to this the retirement age has not yet been raised, but is only proposed to be raised.

Retirement is a drain on social services.

Retirement isn't a drain, it is a social service. Unless you are wealthy, you cannot retire without corporate or government social insurance plans like pensions, social security, paid off mortgages, medicare, etc. Without these plans, we go back to the Dickensian past where the poor and old slept on the streets or in workhouses until they died.

Some might even say retirement is the goal of life, defined however the individual wants to define it.

Social services themselves are a drain on social services -- that is the sense in which I meant retirement is one.

Sorry, I realized that after I posted, but I disagree with the framing (based on my interpretation of the word "drain") that using them is inherently a bad thing or that they should be rationed in some way.

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