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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s time to bite the bullet and raise the retirement^W elder benefits eligibility age and peg it to life expectancy at birth minus 15 years or some structure like that. It’s fine that my generation will have to eat the loss - having paid for the past one but not benefiting as much from the coming ones. Some generation has to, and better us than them.

As we get better at healthcare and life, we should expect to be productive and care for ourselves for longer. I hope that as I age I remain in favour of succeeding generations over my own self. Plant the tree whose shade we won’t see etc.

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> peg it to life expectancy at birth minus 15 years

That would lower the retirement age for me. I was born in the mid-80s.

I know that was just a suggestion. We could go with something like "life expectancy at birth minus 5 years", which would raise the retirement age for me, but we're basically just admitting that retirement isn't a thing anymore if we do that. Hopefully the wealthiest nation on Earth can do better.

I think, whatever we do, we should recognize that the current retired generation holds more wealth than any other generation. If we want more kids in our society, maybe we need to get some of that wealth into the hands of people who can have more kids.

Ahhh I’m a terrible communicator I meant “the current value of the reported metric life expectancy at birth”.

We should establish UBI and universal health care, not tied to age, and then the concept of "retirement age" can go away.

I suppose we could pay everyone about $1.2k/mo and that would exhaust the entire current federal budget but that would eliminate the 60% or so of the federal budget dedicated to the aggregate of all social welfare programs. The tax increases required would be substantial to keep Medicare, Social Security, Health services, Education, and so on.

Without more productive capacity the extra $1.2k/mo would cause enormous inflation. Just a question of what the country is optimizing for, I suppose, but I think people would be unhappy with the result.

> that would eliminate the 60% or so of the federal budget dedicated to the aggregate of all social welfare programs

The combination of UBI and healthcare largely should. UBI serves as a better alternative to most such programs (and has much less administrative overhead).

Also, any form of UBI will likely result in substantial spending increases (trickle-up economics is well-established as actually working, incremental dollars handed to the average person are typically spent, not saved), as well as reducing structural friction in the labor market (people can change jobs more easily).

> Without more productive capacity

UBI will also likely result in more businesses/entrepreneurship, R&D, and other substantial improvements to productive capacity. Studies generally show that UBI does not cause people to substantially leave the job market.

Studies also show that $1.2k/mo sustained do not result in substantial changes to people’s lives. They change what they spend their time on but not in a productive direction. If we eliminate the 60% of spending and give people $1.2k/mo we nearly instantly kill almost all dialysis patients. That amount is below the floor of cost for that treatment. And those 800k people use just under 1% of the federal budget.

I already said "combination of UBI and healthcare".

And I fully expect that to do it properly, we would need to have a government-revenue-to-GDP ratio higher than our current near-rock-bottom on that scale.

I am starting to consider that health care should absolutely be tied to age. Rationing limited resource based on most fair criteria seems only reasonable action to do.

What even is retirement age and what practical impact would changing it have on society? People can retire or keep working at whatever age they want as long as they can afford to

Retirement age is usually tied to various benefits. In the UK it's the age at which you can collect the state pension (currently around £12K per year, if you worked for 30-35 years). Changing the retirement age therefore affects the state's finances, quite dramatically in fact: https://obr.uk/box/the-fiscal-impact-of-increases-in-the-sta...

Denmark is already considering raising the retirement age to 70: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088957

This is the natural consequence of declining birth rates.. it's either that or immigration right now.

Encouraging people to have more children requires drastic changes in society which is difficult to implement.

In some countries you can reach retirement age, get a pension and keep working. So you profit more. It's complicated as maybe you've paid to your pension since 18yrs of age and you should get some money back, but many pensions aren't based on those actual savings but on tax payers actively funding that pension. Is double dipping ok then?

That's not what double dipping means.

In this case, I presume they're taxed on their continued employment and so they're still paying into the pension they're receiving benefits on? I don't see a problem if that's the case. They contributed to the pension with an agreed payment date and followed the process correctly. I can understand how you feel that it's unfair, but I really don't see a problem unless they stop paying into the pension or stop paying taxes on their continued employment.

The double-dipping unfairness is mostly perceived when there is high unemployment in youth, and we're allowing, via tax rules, for retirement aged persons to have decent returns on their work. They get a living-rate pension AND a job.

Like others note, UBI is a fair solution. Let's have everyone, regardless of age, be able to have a baseline. Then allow extra income form those who enjoy, or value, additional work and income.

Ah this is not a universal term. I see. I will edit. I meant “age of eligibility for elder age benefits and pensions”. E.g. social security eligibility age, state pension age, etc.

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