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Comment by malicka | Hacker News Reader

Luckily, society broadly creates more than enough wealth and resources to provide for you, even when you are disabled or elderly.

In modern society, if you are a “sink,” it is solely because the system is designed to make you that way – perhaps the wealthiest among us are able to pay a bit less on taxes, in exchange for your caretaker not getting monetary support. For example. I reckon gutting social security would be very profitable to some.

The government’s job is to be useful, and supporting those who can’t support themselves – like the elderly and disabled – is very literally the most noble and useful thing it can do.

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>Luckily, society broadly creates more than enough wealth and resources to provide for you, even when you are disabled or elderly.

I see no evidence to indicate this. Societies do not exist in a vacuum, they either need to import resources, or they need to defend against invaders. Therefore, the more resources that go to the non productive, the less resources there are for importing and/or defense.

Importing also includes quality of life for young, productive people, as they usually aspire for material goods rather than living life solely for the purpose of servicing the non productive.

Having large portions of society not be productive for decades, even requiring large amounts of manual, highly educated labor to sustain them, may very well cause discord and decrease global standing. Demographics and the shape of population histograms affect inputs and outputs.

The simple evidence of my claims is the continual decrease of Social Security benefits. A simple monetary wealth transfer, easily comparable over time periods, is unsustainable due to increased longevity and lower total fertility rates, resulting in multiple cuts to Social Security benefits. It is common knowledge that people paying Social Security taxes now will receive less benefits.

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/nra.html

Even the UK has quite the political conundrum with needing to get rid of their "triple lock" pensions, but not having the political will to do it.

> I see no evidence to indicate this. Societies do not exist in a vacuum, they either need to import resources, or they need to defend against invaders. Therefore, the more resources that go to the non productive, the less resources there are for importing and/or defense.

We are not nearly in such a resource-counting phase: We produce more than enough food to feed every single person in the US several times over: we have enough empty homes to ensure every person is housed; we have enough of much everything. Thanks to innovations that have happened under Capitalism, we are less resource-constrained in this regard than ever in human history. We have great excesses that are wasted, sometimes to our detriment, and sometimes comedically (ex., the practice of burning tonnes of corn by farmers in attempt to keep prices higher).

That Social Security is unsustainable is not due to a lack of physical resources nor manpower, but capital. Money.

There is currently a cap on taxable income, for Social Security. For the first $168 000, you pay the Social Security tax; for income beyond that point, you do not.

If we lifted or even abolished the cap, Social Security would be more than above water, and no cuts whatsoever would be necessary.

> we have enough of much everything.

Not advanced healthcare, education, and laborious tasks such as cleaning people, and working in hot or cold cramped spaces to provide utilities.

>we are less resource-constrained in this regard than ever in human history.

Some things are plentiful, but some things are scarcer. Part of it is people have more opportunity and knowledge to choose to more preferable things rather than less preferable things.

>That Social Security is unsustainable is not due to a lack of physical resources nor manpower, but capital. Money.

Money is a proxy for manpower. For sure there is lots more room to take wealth from workers and give it to non workers, but expect more and more political headwinds and long term consequences. We have already been doing it for many decades, mostly via reducing the purchasing power of the currency (which hits workers the most) and inflating price of assets. I would posit it is at the forefront of the zeitgeist of young people feeling despondent. As I wrote before, it is trivial to know that young people today will get less than they pay in (absent the development of a robot that can pretty much do all the dirty tasks humans would rather not do).

> Money is a proxy for manpower.

It is. But you are talking about a very specific policy: How much money goes into Social Security. The cap is arbitrary – not a calculated reflection of physical reality. It is an artificial restraint! Whether the cap is $160 000 or $500 000, you can’t just say “this is a reflection of resource-scarcity” when it is very much a policy decision made to allow the wealthy to pay less taxes.

> For sure there is lots more room to take wealth from workers and give it to non workers, but expect more and more political headwinds and long term consequences.

The goal is, in my eyes, to reduce wealth taken from workers by non-workers – the owners that increasingly make more and more money proportionally to workers. The young always got less than they put in – that’s how companies profit – but now they get even less than they used to. This is because we’ve allowed wages and salaries to stagnate, letting wealth inequality become incomprehensibly massive compared to just two generations ago. The results of this is what makes the young poorer and despondent.

Raising a tax marginally on these owners, like raising the Social Security cap such that the ultra-wealthy pay more into it, doesn’t break physical reality nor does it take money from workers. It takes money from non-workers.

FICA taxes are earned income taxes, they take from workers by design.

Land value taxes (and other forms of taxing wealth such as estate tax) take from non workers. Funnily enough, that is never on the table, only more taxes on earned income.

Regardless, even that can be exhausted. Seize all the assets from everyone in the top 10%, and you still won’t have enough to pay for all the labor to service too many old people.

The country needs to keep exporting to keep the purchasing power of the currency sufficient to incentivize people to work for the money in the first place.

> Seize all the assets from everyone in the top 10%, and you still won’t have enough to pay for all the labor to service too many old people.

We are nowhere near that point; you could perhaps make this argument for Japan (though I’d be skeptical), but for the US? No, I’m sorry. That is very, very, far off. Our age distribution is healthy enough that every older person can be taken care of just fine — and we don’t need to seize all the assets of the top 10%. I really don’t understand how you can come to the conclusion that we are in such a resource and labor crisis based solely on slight funding shortfall for Social Security (which can be remedied by raising the cap a bit). It’s just narrative, that’s all you have.

Let’s talk about letting grandma starve when it’s a real problem, alright? Stop the dehumanization of old folk. We don’t like ageism around here.

> I do hope that I have the fortitude to take myself out though once I become too much of a resource sink for my descendants.

Seriously. It’s sad to see someone preemptively throw their life away over an imaginary crisis.

I wrote that food is not the issue, keeping grandma alive after heart attack or kidney failure or other things that require a lots of resources is the issue.

It is already impossible to see a doctor, and people have to settle for an NP/PA. A large proportion of young people are already despondent that they will never earn enough money to have enough purchasing power to increase their living standards.

These things are connected. And at every point, the solution has always been to tax young people more. That’s the ageism. Old people get federal government backed asset prices, discounts on property taxes, and young people get increased earned income taxes, for benefits they will never get themselves.

> Seriously. It’s sad to see someone preemptively throw their life away over an imaginary crisis.

It’s not throwing my life away to not want my descendants to spend their resources on caring for me all the time. Obviously, I am not talking about suicide just because I need help getting groceries, but instead when I need hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep me alive for a couple months or years in a bed, I think that could be better spent elsewhere in society.

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