The Grim Secret of Nordic Happiness: Reasonable Expectations
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No one alive sees a return on the $200 investment, but for a lousy $200, or less than 55¢ a day for a year, your great great great grandrelatives won't need to pay taxes, and their great great great grandrelatives won't need to work or ever worry about housing and feeding themselves.
If it were, then anyone whose great -grandfather set aside $20 in 1950 would get a huge windfall today.
Contrary to this straw man, I was suggesting a principle of $70B invested with compounding annual interest over 140 and 280 years, which would build to ~$64T and ~$60Q respectively.
Assuming the US population nearly doubles in 14 generations to 600M, there would be $100M per citizen in the sovereign wealth fund, which at 5% interest, would generate $5M per citizen annually.
So putting it beyond your argument doesn't really make any sense.
> it's not as though more money will make them poorer
If I have 1000 dollars today and then have 2000 dollars in 10 years, but the dollar itself has dropped down to below 50% it's initial value, how exactly am I not poorer?
On the contrary, compounding interest is key to my argument. Inflation is entirely absent in my argument. You introduced inflation to construct your straw man. Promoting fallacy does not make for valid argument.
> If I have 1000 dollars today and then have 2000 dollars in 10 years, but the dollar itself has dropped down to below 50% it's initial value, how exactly am I not poorer?
I have already addressed this straw man in my previous comment: historically, interest rates always increase to counter inflation. My argument did not mention inflation, but I also kept the interest rate at a flat 5%. If you want to introduce inflation, then I will increase interest rates to counter it, resulting in nullifying your inflation and your straw man argument, twice.
Ignoring inflation is total idiocy. Otherwise you might as well just push the government to add a zero to every denomination. Then there are more dollars in circulation and you don’t need to wait a century.
> If you want to introduce inflation, then I will increase interest rates to counter it
Your “argument” is basically “I will make up numbers and conditions to match the desired imaginary future I want to see.” You truly are a deep thinker.
Let's check your numbers one at a time. Here's your premise:
> If every US citizen was required to pay a one-time tax of $200 towards the fund, that'd be close to $70B, which is a good start. At a conservative 5% annual return, the fund would begin growing by $3.5B/yr. After 3 generations, or 60 years, the fund would probably be over half a trillion dollars and increasing faster than ever. In another 3 generations, just part of the return could pay everyones' taxes and still have plenty left to keep growing the fund.
260 million US adults * $200 = $52,000,000,000 invested in 2022
(already off by 25% in step 1... let's see where this goes)
$52 billion at 5% annually = $2,600,000,000 / year
Per your instructions ("3 generations, or 60 years"), we wait for 60 years, at which point the $52 billion will have grown to $971 billion.
Wait another 60 years ("another 3 generations"), at which point the fund has grown to $18 trillion.
So, it's now the year 2142. Your fund has $18 trillion to work with. The US population is only projected to grow to about 450 million, with about 350 million adults. At 5%, this would generate $900,000,000,000 / 350,000,000 = $2,571 each year per citizen.
(at this point, you somehow came to the conclusion that the fund could generate $5 million annually per citizen, which is off by over 19,000%! Any time you have inputs like $200/person and outputs like $5 million/person, that's a sign that you might want to step back and reflect on your logic.)
So already we're in a pretty disappointing place. All that work, over a century of saving, and we're only getting returns of $2.5k per person?
But wait, it gets worse - $2.5k sounds like a modest amount of money in 2022. What kind of purchasing power will it have in 2142? Well, one way to guess is to see what $2.5k today would have equated to in 1902:
About $75.
That's how much extra purchasing power you'll be passing on to your great-great-great grandkids with this scheme. The equivalent of someone giving you a "free" $75/year, today.
Congratulations, you've reinvented a savings account!
If it were possible to park one-time investments of low amounts ($200) into low-risk vehicles (5%), wait a century or two, and get to "won't need to work or ever worry about housing and feeding themselves again" money, then our whole monetary system would have imploded long ago.
You do, apparently, because your math is terrible.
>Let's check your numbers one at a time. Here's your premise:
>> If every US citizen was required to pay a one-time tax of $200 towards the fund, that'd be close to $70B, which is a good start. At a conservative 5% annual return, the fund would begin growing by $3.5B/yr. After 3 generations, or 60 years, the fund would probably be over half a trillion dollars and increasing faster than ever. In another 3 generations, just part of the return could pay everyones' taxes and still have plenty left to keep growing the fund.
>260 million US adults * $200 = $52,000,000,000 invested in 2022 (already off by 25% in step 1... let's see where this goes)
Hello, there are over 331M US citizens. Again with the terrible comprehension and a straw man, here you have inexplicably turned "US citizens" into "US adults".
> $52 billion at 5% annually = $2,600,000,000 / year
Being that you changed the premise, this calculation is wrong to begin with, and you've failed to understand the concept of compounding interest. Only the first year will $72B generate $3.6B. The second year, the principle has increased to $75.6B, so the interest gained increases to $3.78B, and so on and so forth.
> Per your instructions ("3 generations, or 60 years"), we wait for 60 years, at which point the $52 billion will have grown to $971 billion. Wait another 60 years ("another 3 generations"), at which point the fund has grown to $18 trillion.
Wrong, but again, you counted the number of US adults, not the number of US citizens.
> So, it's now the year 2142. Your fund has $18 trillion to work with. The US population is only projected to grow to about 450 million, with about 350 million adults.
I'm not sure why you are obsessed with US adults when population count includes everyone.
>At 5%, this would generate $900,000,000,000 / 350,000,000 = $2,571 each year per citizen. (at this point, you somehow came to the conclusion that the fund could generate $5 million annually per citizen, which is off by over 19,000%! Any time you have inputs like $200/person and outputs like $5 million/person, that's a sign that you might want to step back and reflect on your logic.)
Your straw men are coming apart, as now you've acknowledged I had referred to all citizens, not merely adults. Even with your misinterpretation of the premise, $2,571 will pay most of their income tax, as I had stipulated after that amount of time. But I was very specific about those returns after 14 generations, or 280 years, not half that, and not only "adults." Thus we are both also failing to account for continuing additions to the principle by all new borns, which is 3.8M born per year, which is an additional $760M added to the principle annually beyond the compounding interest. But this mistake only works against your argument and only benefits mine.
You are intentionally misreading, misleading, oversimplifying and exaggerating. Your ability to reason, let alone calculate compounding interest, is deeply flawed, and your argument is riddled with fallacy. And this is no great surprise because you are obviously trolling me, thus explaining your absence of logic. You are clearly not interested in persuading but only in attempting to humiliate. This is a tell-tale symptom of toxic narcissism, which as often as not, can be cured in less than 2 years trolling your psychologist instead of me. As you're probably not suffering, it is unlikely you will seek corrective treatment, however, it is very likely you are causing suffering in those you actually do care about, so if you could keep them in mind, maybe there is hope for you. Good luck.
But that would be socialism and socialism is bad.
Better to have everyone pull themselves up by their bootstraps than have them be debased by a government that actually provides for their welfare, like they're babies. Americans aren't babies, Americans are cowboys. Cowboys don't need a sovereign wealth fund or a nanny state, they just need a Bible, a gun and a good horse. All of which they're welcome to purchase at free market value.
> The OECD have not included the United States in these reviews, but if added the country would have the highest or second-highest rate