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Comment by thunderbird120 | Hacker News Reader

>Wanna guess what happens in that welcoming environment? My guess is people feel inclined to make some babies.

I would assume the exact opposite given that this will probably probably crank up pressure on working-aged people as more and more old people need to be supported by fewer and fewer young. I would also assume a significant exodus of the young to places with actual opportunities rather than a country sized retirement home where no one wants to invest in the future because anything built to fit the needs of the population at any given moment will be massively overbuilt in the near future.

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This was my exact same though while reading OP's comment. Taxes will go way up since the number of people having to support all the old people will be fewer and fewer. The increased taxes will cause people to have fewer and fewer children. It's a vicious cycle.

Fortunately tax policy can be adjusted to encourage things you want to happen within a society. If taxes are punitive, tax credits for having children would lead to a baby boom based on the same logic.

I don't think it's the case, old folks will outvote the young, same as the property speculators are doing.

i don't think a society that allows old people to vote themselves young people's money just because there's more of them is a good one.

I'm not sure encouraging more children will help long term though. Eventually we need to figure out how to make society work without population growth.

we have the same kind of situation in America just a little behind, so here are my thoughts "as a young person": none of my peers want to pay for that. we're not going to sit around letting old people leech from us instead of working. and at the end of the day younger people hold more physical power and more working ability so we will have the final say regardless of how many old people there are to vote themselves our $. i expect that if they try this a couple things might happen:

1. young people leave for better states

2. young people outvote old people (not likely)

3. young people refuse to pay and force the government to raise the social security age to 83.

i hope it's 3. in 1935 the average life expectancy was 60 to a social security age of 65, so 1.08 times the life expectancy. the life expectancy now is 77, so keep the same 1.08 times and we have a minimum age of about 83.

it really baffles me how the same generation that talks about how "millennials and gen z wont work hard" literally wants to force us to pay for their retirement. they had 65 years to save up money, they can pay for it themselves.

> young people refuse to pay and force the government

How they would be able to "refuse to pay" if payment will come as form of taxes for goods and services? And moreover they won't be able to "force" government to anything since government will be representing and working for the majority of people who voted for them: older generations

in that case i hope there is forcible resistance. a government that robs its youth is not a just one even if a majority supports it.

You completely misunderstood the parent comment. They explicitly called out:

> lack of disproportionately large population of unproductive elderly dependents.

This feels like a non-issue. The boomer generation is probably one of the wealthiest generations in history. And the younger generations have for the most part been fairly underemployed. Feels like there is more than enough slack in the labor markets to handle the extra work, and taxes could be targeted towards the wealth assets of the boomers (stocks, real estate, etc...).

Don't know what it's like in Korea, but in China, it's pretty common to have pension higher than local average salary if you were in the state job system, which is absolutely huge. This is due to the polical power dynamic.

Many provinces are barely scraping by, young workers are not only effectively directly supporting pensioners, they are now delaying young workers retirement age, and you better not believe the old folks will willing to eat into their own money.

A lot of the people doing physically demanding labor are also outside the country.

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