Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

I think this article has been submitted before. (The submission here is not a submission of the canonical URL.) Anyway, by the usual generation labeling in the United States, the most profligate generation in United States history is the "Silent Generation," the generation mostly born during the Great Depression (who make up the parent generation of the younger half of the Baby Boom). They began and sustained the trend of spending far in advance of revenue, all the while thinking that they "earned" their government transfer payments. I, a Baby Boomer, have a higher retirement age than my parents have, and have paid a higher rate of payroll or self-employment taxes into Social Security than my parents generally did.

But the submitted article is correct that the older generations in the United States will have to rethink their attitude toward "entitlements" (transfer payments) even more if our children's generation is to have any prospect of continued economic growth. On my part, I'm happy to see my retirement age nudged up some more, and also for old-age benefits and other government benefits to take actual cuts (rather than merely decreases in their rate of increase over time) to make sure that they are funded on an actuarially sound basis. I vote like that, and I discuss the issue with my generation-mates in these terms. The older should be helping the younger, in general, not the other way around.

>I, a Baby Boomer, have a higher retirement age than my parents have, and have paid a higher rate of payroll or self-employment taxes into Social Security than my parents generally did.

I think the key observation you're making is that baby boomers' parents will have had a better retirement than the baby boomers are likely to, because at the time their parents were retired, the boomers were in their prime working age and there were plenty of resources to care for the then-retirees.

The trouble is that the converse is happening and about to happen. And there isn't really anything anyone could have done about it, other than maybe for the boomers to have had more kids. All of the attempts to do it through economic hocus pocus are kind of missing the point. The social security trust fund is a piece of paper that says there is a social security trust fund. The bonds it redeems still have to be paid by the treasury in the year the money is spent. The same goes for private retirement savings -- when you cash in your stocks and buy nursing services, you take a productive worker out of the economy to provide nursing services when that person could otherwise have been a scientist or small business owner or the like.

The problem stems from the fact that the things retirees want are, as a general rule, less economically productive than the things working people want. Boomers having saved a substantial amount of money for retirement would actually make that problem worse because it means all the more resources under their control to be allocated to leisure and non-research medical care, rather than education and R&D and other such things that retirees have little personal incentive to demand.

The article's suggestion (inflation) is only a solution in the sense that it reduces the economic power of the retirees, meaning that they get less healthcare and the young get more education and infrastructure. But the tradeoff is still inevitable -- they're just pointing out a method of making it in a way that moves the slider away from retirees in the face of the strong political power of the AARP, by placing the decision in the hands of the federal reserve board which is not as easily influenced by lobby groups as elected officials.

"I, a Baby Boomer, have a higher retirement age than my parents have ..."

It went up from 65 to 67 years. That isn't worth remarking upon, imho. Considering life expectancy, it probably went down as a percentage of expected lifetime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_%28United_Stat...

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