sykhic

Pensions are not inherently unsustainable. They exist in the private sector in other countries and there are still some well funded private sector pensions in the U.S. They don't work well if they are not properly funded. Corporations got rid of pensions not because the concept is inherently unsustainable but because it's more profitable to do away with them.

My pension plan is not a good one. You characterization of one group of state employees giving a dream set of benefits to another is not based in reality. Administration does not negotiate strongly with us the contract won't be approved by the legislature or signed by the governor. Our wages relative to buying power has not been going up or remaining steady.

If pensions are inherently unsustainable then you must conclude that it is unsustainable for a society to care for itself.

Yes, clearly the return on services and government investment is quite poor in the U.S. It's a situation in which people reasonably believe that paying more in taxes is throwing money at the problem. This is especially so when one of the major parties actively seeks to prove that government is incompetent.

I believe at some point in time California and other wealthy states will want to secede. They are subsidizing the poorer states and at some point they may question the benefits of the union.

I'm a public employee. I don't cause the government to write its contract with me to be the way it is. It's negotiated between my union and the state Department of Education. It is then voted on by the legislative branch and signed by the governor. It's a long process. At no point am I or my fellow workers the ones making the promises.

It costs money to run government. Employees need to be paid. We have had lay offs when budgets were constrained. The funding per pupil has steadily decreased the last 30 years and hence tuition has similarly increased. Our salaries relative to purchasing power has decreased over this time.

I agree that it's largely a crisis of leadership. Both major parties are to blame. Kicking the can down the road, so to speak, has proved politically rewarding. I think that we, as a people, need to stop thinking that taxation is inherently bad. Taxation with incompetent governance is inherently bad. Taxation with little in return is bad. But taxation itself is not bad. Nor are we overtaxed in absolute terms. We are overtaxed in terms of return from government.

I certainly don't advocate throwing money at the situation. I advocate that as a nation we take a step back on reassess what our views on government are. We've largely bought into the false beliefs that government is always incompetent, government regulation is inherently bad, and taxation is bad. I don't see how to get out of the mess we are in. These are structural problems in the nation and I think secession is going to occur in the next 50 years or so.

The next table (the one below, right?) shows only the relative percent of where taxes come from. It does not describe tax rates. It merely states that around 50% of U.S. tax revenue come from taxing income and profits. This is not the tax rate on that source.

Overal taxation in the U.S. is low compared to other OECD countries [1]. We, as a nation, decided that low taxes was the goal. As a result infrastructure is poor, toll roads are increasing, privatization of prisons, intelligence gathering, war, etc. are rising too. Yet Americans falsely believe they are overtaxed. The situation is easy to fix in economic terms but not in political terms. The road to an Ayn Randian paradise in which everyone fends for themselves will lead us to ruin.

Corporations have largely shunted the responsibility for retirement savings onto individual workers. Now said workers have no pensions and have uncertain retirements. Instead of asking why they have no pensions they seek to equalize status by falsely believing we can't afford any sort of pension.

As a nation we need to seriously rethink the role and purpose of government and how taxation is a part of the proper functioning of government.

[1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxe...

From my perspective the decline has been going on since the end of the Reagan administration. There are a number of reasons for my belief but I think it has been steadily going on for 30 years now. Prior the Civil War Alexis de Tocqueville famously predicted the rise of America. After the war our dominance in the Western Hemisphere was solidified and at the beginning of the 20th century it was clear that resource rich America with its vast land mass was able to achieve scales of economy that no other nation could match. It was clear that we were still a rising power at that time.

It's one thing asking allies to help fight a war and quite another asking them to pay for it. Japan famously was asked to pay $10 billion. It was disconcerting to see this as an American. Allegedly the war was worth fighting for America but I guess not worth America paying for it. We were willing to spill our blood but not open our wallets.

Japan does not have the capability to compete with Chinese naval power. Why do you think it’s unlikely that the US will go down? What time frame are you attributing this unlikelihood to take place in? I’m assuming you mean in the next few decades and not meaning a much larger time frame.

I have no expertise but it appears from my perspective that the US is in a state of imperial decline. I think this will accelerate in the coming decades. For me the canary in the coal mine event was Gulf War 1 when the US went around asking other countries to help pay for our war. Mercenary nation. There are lots of other signs of imperial decline as I see things but that event was very telling.

I’ve started using Walmart.com for just this reason. I no longer trust Amazon. Trust is a hard thing to acquire once it’s lost. After an Amazon Basics usb cable stopped working after a few weeks I don’t even trust Amazon's own products.