Hacker News Reader

Comment by lbotos | Hacker News Reader

> Wall Street is chomping at the bit to get access to worker retirement funds.

What do you mean by this? My 401k is.... publicly traded stocks? What am I missing?

Private equity. Only ~4300 US companies are public, so money managers want to juice management fees by expanding accessibility into alternative asset classes.

Private equity to lobby Trump for access to savers’ retirement funds - https://www.ft.com/content/dddd1752-789a-40b6-9aa8-d7cf6f408... | https://archive.today/HrDgt

The stock market is shrinking and Jamie Dimon is worried - https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/09/investing/premarket-stocks-tr...

Shrinking public markets mean growth in private markets - https://fsinvestments.com/fs-insights/chart-of-the-week-2024...

Interesting fact: As of the end of 2024, the Magnificent Seven stocks made up 35.4% of the S&P 500's value.

I remember when "privatizing social security" was considered a horrifying prospect under the W Bush administration and became unpopular very quickly. I'm not so optimistic this time around.

He's talking about social security revenue. Obviously, the government is much better at this than your 401k plan even though they pissed away decades of surpluses by buying treasuries with them that would require the government to massively increase future taxes to ever be able to pay those back (let alone with interest). Instead, he would prefer, I suspect, that social security withholdings be increased, taxes increased, all so that 23 million people can continue to receive poverty-level checks of $1950 a month, though you won't be allowed to collect yours until you're 70 or older.

Social security doesn't work though, unless there are a dozen workers paying into it for every retiree, and no one's having enough children for that to ever be the case again.

    > and no one's having enough children for that to ever be the case again.

Immigration, increase the threshold, means tested distributions, lots of ways to solve this.

Generally, most pro-social-security people say that all of those are not necessary, not just some.

However, take a look at your first item. How are these immigrants going to pay into social-security exactly, when there isn't a large jobs base to be had? Part of the de-industrialization that the United States underwent was predicated on the notion that if our population was going to shrink anyway, we didn't need that. Now with all those jobs gone and famously "never coming back", bringing in more immigrants to short up a defunct pyramid scheme seems sort of silly.

And as for your second item, where you say "just pay more in" doesn't much jibe with "means tested distribution" where if the government deems you too rich to need it, you don't get it. It really is just welfare at that point, and not a mandatory retirement program we'll all enrolled in. No one has time for that nonsense. Do you have any faith that when the next Trump is in office (which surely will be the case in a few decades, if not much sooner), that you will make the cut for "means tested distributions"? How is that any different than just cutting social security from everyone, if it were to become policy?

OP is talking about Social Security, not your 401(k).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com