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Comment by anshumankmr | Hacker News Reader

However, there is still the fact that the more elderly there are, the more resources are drained to help them, which I am not saying is a bad thing, but to keep the cycle of social security cheques and pensions going, you need more people in the workforce who can work to pay taxes who in turn hope to receive the same benefits when they come of that age.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/071514/why-social-s...

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These elderly will eventually pass. This temporary increase in drag on economic productivity (“the pig in the Python”) is what you sign up for when your population can’t grow forever. The world has never been wealthier; we can afford a bit more elderly care costs for a window of time.

Everyone likes to spend on a credit card, no one likes it when the statement comes and you have to pay.

Your [1] footnote seems to be missing...a search turns up plenty of references, and the analogy itself with the context of demographics is descriptive enough, but I'm curious what you were going to link to.

Baby boomer reference to Pig in the Python term. Removed because I didn’t feel it relevant when discussing world population versus a US centric cohort.

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

It's worse than that. Not only will social security be more difficult to fund, but private retirement savings will also be more difficult. Saving for retirement is much easier with a fast-growing economy in which you can get high rates of return. With a slower-growing, or even flat, economy, stocks and other investments should appreciate more slowly, too. (There are fewer good investment opportunities when the size of the pie is fixed.)

A flat population does not necessarily mean economic growth must stop. Economic growth can still come from plenty of other places, like better infrastructure, technology improvements, various types of efficiency gains, etc. etc.

And how long can we keep this infinite growth of people going? That's clearly not sustainable either

Under no plausible estimation do we have infinite growth.

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

Social security tax phaseout is currently ~$140k per year. It's fairly absurd that the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos of the world pay roughly the same amount into Social Security as an average programmer.

Why? Are they going to get substantially more benefits from SS than an average programmer?

Social security is not a personal slush fund. It is a social program.

What you're describing would be an anti-social program.

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