Comment by kylehotchkiss
2 days ago
I always see the words pensions in civic deficit news. I'm early 30s and pensions are a concept that nobody my age or younger will ever benefit from yet is footing the bill for.
2 days ago
I always see the words pensions in civic deficit news. I'm early 30s and pensions are a concept that nobody my age or younger will ever benefit from yet is footing the bill for.
You’ve already benefited from them, by getting government services at a lower up front cost by acquiring labor with the promise of them on the backend.
(And, barring those promises not being fulfilled, plenty of people your age and younger have already been working in jobs that qualify them for pensions when they reach a certain age, or have a relative with such a pension with survivorship benefits, and will benefit from them as beneficiaries.)
Most of today is the result of stealing from the future, and that strategy is running out of steam.
> Most of today is the result of stealing from the future, and that strategy is running out of steam
If you "calculate the net present value (NPV) of benefits received minus taxes paid for US generations born 1850 to 2090," you find "all generations 1950 to 2050 are net gainers, while many current elderly are losers" [1].
("There are two peaks in net benefits. The first peak was centered on the cohort born in 1908 which experienced the large windfall gains from the start-up of social security but missed much of the windfall losses from the expansion of public education funding. On net, the 1908 cohort received net transfers amounting to 5.7% of lifetime earnings. The second peak in net benefit is centered on the cohorts born in 1993-94 which experienced the positive benefits of the educational expansion funded by previous generations and which are projected to avoid the looming net costs of paying the social security and Medicare implicit debt. On net, these cohorts are forecast to receive net benefits amounting to 5.6% of lifetime earnings.
There are three sets of cohorts which experienced net losses through the transfer systems. Those born before 1880 experienced net losses due to the expansion of the public education system. Those born between 1930 and 1947 also experienced net losses. While these cohorts did receive large windfall gains associated with the start-up periods for Social Security and Medicare, these were more than offset by windfall losses from the expansion of the public education system. Cohorts born after 2060 are expected to incur increasingly large net losses via the public transfer systems as Social Security and Medicare overwhelm the gains through education.")
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2840408/
5 replies →
Now financial instruments like pensions are stealing? In what way? Those workers worked for that pension. It’s funny how the top wealth owners have vacuumed up more and more wealth and you’re mad at the regular Joe working a 9-5.
10 replies →
The person that worked for 25 years starting at 18 for a full pension benefited me? Nah, I think they benefited far far more.
They're beneficial to younger generations, provided that there's enough value generated by the younger generations to cover the cost of the pension.
The problem is, this new wave of retirees - the Baby Boomers - did not have enough children. Their children's generation - the Millennials - can thus charge more for their labor. The Millennials also aren't having enough children.
This means that the people generating the value are taking more of the value for themselves to live on (though not relative to inflation, but that's a different conversation), and there's fewer of them contributing to pensions through various government revenue schemes.
Also, anecdotally, my parents have far more expensive plans for their retirement than my grandparents ever did.
Are you mad at the pensioners, who worked for decades on the agreement they’d get a pension, or are you mad at the oligarchs and businesses who lobbied to make pensions a thing of the past so that you’re not protected as well?
You should be mad at the Capitalists not the workers.
Patrick Boyle did a segment recently on pensions that I cannot locate. He pointed out that the private industry in the US that granted generous pensions in the mid-20th century all went bankrupt, and that is why there are not private-sector US pensions anymore. It coincided with globalization, but is more a symptom of the countercyclical nature of pension expenses. They cost most when a business can bear the costs least.
This is one of many ways that folks aged 70+ had it much better than folks in the workforce now, and represents generational inequality that you should not minimize or attribute to "capitalists."
You may, if you like, attribute it to "generosity" by individuals indifferent to "math."
> They cost most when a business can bear the costs least.
Shouldn't a reasonable business have been investing forward to avoid this problem? IE, you don't use todays dollars, you use yesterdays dollars.
Its seems the flaw is that they lacked sufficient savvy to invest the pensions in a way where it would be able to build upon itself.
1 reply →
I think they're mad at a society that promised generous pensions in exchange for lower wages, and then (for various reasons) didn't deliver them.
It's worth noting that a lot of shares in publicly traded companies are held by retirement and pension funds.
Money paid to a shareholder is money not paid to the person doing the labor and vice-versa.
That's not to say that pension funds are the sole reason that wages haven't kept up with costs over the last 50-ish years, but it doesn't help, particularly when management/the oligarchs are compensated mainly using the same shares that those retirement and pension funds use to generate revenues for the people they cover.