Its funny that the government is as bad with money as the people. Truly a good representation.
Too bad that "nothing" is my generation and we'll be putting our "contributions" into a pit that will give us actually nothing in return when it's time for us to retire.
As I get older I realize why people say if you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart but if you are not a conservative by 30, you have no brain (or something to that effect).
The same generation that mindlessly claims that millennials are spoiled while we field $10K+ medical bills for things like childbirth when they cost <$1K for them. I haven't seen any data to back this up but I suspect they're also far higher in diabetes diagnoses which is another reason our care costs so much more.
Being liberal and conservative is what got us here in the first place. Expansion of political ideas is only now becoming popular as this generation really feels the effects of wishy-washy American liberalism and conservatism that favors the already extremely wealthy.
Candidate A says, "We need to cut benefits now to make sure the pension has enough money in the future." Candidate B says, "No we don't." Everyone votes for Candidate B.
It's not like we accidentally elected people who don't value the long term. It's that voters don't value the long term when there's real short term money at stake.
The US has a massive problem with the perception of "government usefulness", heck you've got whole political wings solely trying to appeal to "the only good government is no government" mentalities.
As a result, barely anybody wants to pay taxes for anything, in their extremely egotistical and narrow-sighted definition of "freedom".
The reason why many on the right are wary of government programs is because they’ve watched the government horribly mismanage their tax money over and over and over again. It’s not necessarily because politicians and bureaucrats are necessarily stupid or evil, it’s because the government is generally not incentivized to do a good job, since they don’t face competitive pressure like businesses in the private market.
Isn't that exactly the kind of mindset that facilitated this whole situation in the very first place? "Government can't handle money, that's why we gotta privatize everything".
And if that would be true, how come it wasn't a private business that took us the moon, with all the resulting auxiliary inventions, but the combined effort of a whole nation in education and research [0]?
"A better job" isn't always the one that "makes more money", some ventures don't need to be directly financially profitable, in some fields introducing a profit-incentive can have rather negative consequences (Education, Healthcare) and in others, it's just perverse (for-profit prisons).
Would any private company have taken the risk, of flying to the moon, back then? Hell no, because there was literally no money in it back then, it was all just a big venture of "wasting money".
That's why I don't think literally everything needs to be "profitable", we can't eat money and money doesn't make anybody a better person.
It's also friggin weird how on issues like this there's never "enough money", but when it's about tax-cuts for massive corporations, which is, in essence, nothing but handing out free money to private businesses, then there seems to be always plenty of enough money to justify it.
Retirees are also living longer thanks to advances in healthcare. It would not have been easy to predict those longer lifespans decades ago when they were first promised their pensions, but the pension still has to keep paying as long as they live.
None of this is to say that governments have no share in the blame for this. Failing to take action to stabilize these funds, or worse, cutting taxes when the money could have been used to help keep the funds solvent, was a bad decision too many states made.
This is why in both cases out-sourcing/privatization is popular. It shows a short term benefit, the long term is someone else's problem.
How can we expect politicians to care about the pension fund if the problem isn't going to materialize for tens of years pass the end of their term limit?
And if they were a "hero" and increased taxes to try and tackle it, they'd only get voted out next election, so someone else can come in, undo it, then spend all the savings.
In a theoretical Parliamentary Democracy, the "upper house," with lifetime terms would exist primarily for this function, consider the long term interests over the short term point-scoring. But no country that I know of can be described as having an effective upper house.
George H. Bush is one of the few important fiscal conservatives elected in my lifetime, and he is despised for it, especially by people who like to claim they are fiscal conservatives.