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Comment by latentsea | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes, the mental anguish of knowing you'll never retire because you'll either die before retirement age or they'll just keep pushing it up, so that you do.

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Retirement is not an age, it's a financial position. Both my parents and grandparents were able to retire before qualifying for social security payments (and neither ever earned top 30 percentile incomes at any point in their lives).

Diligently save away and invest a portion of your income and you'll be alright.

Retirement used to be an age, when we had defined-benefit pensions.

As long as you were at least (say) 65, if you retired, you got $X/month for the rest of your life.

None of this "you only get to retire if you were lucky enough to make enough your whole life to save enough that it won't run out before you die—and don't guess wrong about when that happens!" None of this "too bad, the stock market crashed just when you were starting to pull out benefits."

Yes, this. I know this type of comment is discouraged by Hacker News but I really want to help you emphasize that retirement used to be a guarantee by the US government after paying into social security all your life. Now… I don't know.

Social Security is still guaranteed by the US government.

Will it be in 20-30 years when I'm of retirement age?

Yes, as much as anything is ever guaranteed in life.

I know I'm nitpicking, but sure — nothing is guaranteed, but it's also not like everything is the same risk.

From my limited understanding the government hasn't been responsibly saving and investing social security withholdings your whole life in a special account for you that invests in index funds and is sitting there for you when you retire.

Instead it works something kinda like a ponzi scheme meets an insurance company. They keep a float of cash that's enough to pay out, and then put the money to use for all sorts of government costs because they won't need it for 30 years. Which works fine until the 30 years is up and they don't have it…

Probably won't happen I assume, they'd probably just print money to pay it back in an inflationary move but regardless — it's a risk that is not the same as every other risk.

To be fair, the original SS age was at the high end of the actuary tables. As science extended life, society failed to move the line of retirement.

To be fair, at that time personal taxes were not at that level and sales taxes mostly didn't exist.

Taxes on the very wealthy were dramatically higher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1935

But there were a lot of deductions and shelters and nobody actually paid those rates except maybe Elvis.

It would be nice if you shared some extensive numbers to quantify that before I take your word for it. Like total government tax revenue vs upper-percentile incomes and upper-percentile incomes vs actual realized income tax percentages. Like, "here is what the median person making 5M in 1955 paid as an effective rate, this is how many of those people there were as a percentage of the population" and the equivalents for the inflation-adjusted people today. Let's look at some of those deductions too - did a 90% top marginal rate in the 40s cause people to make societally useful donations to get deductions? That could still be very beneficial compared to buying bigger yachts.

Top-end compensation has gone through the roof compared to "regular" worker compensation since we started cutting tax rates on the rich. And we also have no shortage of deductions and shelters today either.

So why shouldn't we raise the rates back to at least reduce the consolidation and government revenue trends that have happened since we lowered them?

Here's one quick source that 5 seconds on Google turned up - https://city-countyobserver.com/did-people-really-pay-91-tax... - estimates suggest that top earners in the 50s payed a 42-45% effective tax rate vs today's 26-28% effective tax rate. That's a pretty giant difference! Interestingly, despite that, the top 1% paid a bit smaller of a fraction of total tax income (30-35% vs 40% today) suggesting that it may have helped spread the money around so that the 2-5%, 5-15%, etc parts of the population were relatively better off compared to the top 1%. Less of the top 1% hitting the top marginal rate suggests that it's a rather useful incentive for keeping your salaries less obscene.

We have a way to measure this, it's called the Gini Coefficient, and it spiked in the 80's under deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy. Since then, it's been out of whack with Western norms and now more closely resembles Latin American wealth distribution.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?end=2023&lo...

I think the Thiel index is more theoretically grounded (essentially measures entropy). Not sure if data gets collected on it though.

Most of the population was not / is not wealthy.

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