I'm sorry about the stomping I'm about to do.
2: That's fine. But calling me an asshole? That was a bit much.
Yeah, but.
Post World War II has been very different from the rest of history. Tons of post war demand, technological gains with huge productivity benefits leading to income gains and concurrent political power distribution. It looked as though there would be permanent progress. But the curve is now flattening out in the West. What were once ironclad guarantees are now seen as temporary or expedient.
I remain an optimist, but looking for a 4% return rather than 8%. YMMV.
My logic goes that I got it from Bitch's FB feed, so lots of people will see it soon if I don't seize the opportunity. Plus it contrasts with this post, tone and funninesswise.
My logic goes that I got it from Bitch's FB feed, so lots of people will see it soon if I don't seize the opportunity.
Pwned by sifu, but, um, everyone but you (and maybe B) already saw that a long time ago.
But the curve is now flattening out in the West
The East has its own problems. But with all this worrying about false credentialing what happens to an autodidact like me?
I was struck by a remark that one of the guests made about some people erroneously considering retirement a right.
I listened to bits and pieces of that discussion. Lemme guess, it was the Heritage Foundation panelist who made that remark. It's a fair statement without the "erroneously." Unless you want to get into the weeds about how we're defining rights (only those granted by the Constitution?)
9: What struck me most is, well, no, I've never thought about it as a right, but I also don't want to live in a society where people have to work till they croak. So I'm stuck.
What's wrong with considering it a right? Perhaps there could be other yardsticks besides age, but rights are just things we declare as a society. Also isn't it a right because Social Security is a law, and all citizens have the right to be treated equally by all the laws?
SOME PEOPLE ERRONEOUSLY CONSIDER CHILDHOOD A RIGHT.
The Constitution does not grant rights. It enumerates the powers of the Federal Government. You have your rights regardless of the Constitution. Enforcing those rights, however, may prove problematic without a functioning government.
Life expectancy goes up (was 70 in 1960 in the US), the retirement age must as well. How many decades of retirement should a median worker expect? The biggest problem is for people who do physical work, as knees and back will fail before the rest does. But office workers retiring at 65 and living until 80?
15: Although a lot of increase in life expectancy is due to the decrease in childhood and early adult mortality--life expectancy once you reached 65 has gone up less (bit of course a higher percentage are reaching 65).
I'm waiting for you, unfunded retirees. We'll have a good time, honest.
The Constitution does not grant rights.
SEZ YOU.
15: And to be frank, I think you really need to get the geezers (me soon, for instance) out of the jobs for the system to work. Now, what level of comfort etc. one can expect in retirement is a much more serious discussion.
But office workers retiring at 65 and living until 80?
You know, it's more important for people with physically demanding jobs, but people I know in their late sixties are mostly running out of energy for working, regardless of their life expectancy. Starting around late sixties or seventy, I think people really do need a break.
How can there be a right to retire if there is not a right to work?
On the one hand, we condemn Americans and western Europeans past, present and future for rapacious, disproportionate consumption during the fat years of the twentieth century; on the other, we wish to make basic laws of the privileges and good luck enjoyed by the generations of Americans and western Europeans that came of age or were born during the fat years of the twentieth century.
Life expectancy goes up (was 70 in 1960 in the US), the retirement age must as well
Why? It's not a law of physics or anything.
Also Ezra Klein has made the point a few times that having a retirement age is the single biggest quality-of-life policy that we have in this country, and why would we tinker with something that does an excellent job of increasing people's quality of life?
Point taken at 13, but I'll mention that several current Senatorial candidates are claiming that, e.g. unemployment insurance is unconstitutional. Stipulated that these people are confused, but it's a narrative out there.
11: Also isn't it a right because Social Security is a law, and all citizens have the right to be treated equally by all the laws?
More to the OP, the Diane Rehm show was specifically about public pension programs -- for public employees -- and the troubles they have. The conversation touched on Social Security here and there, and there was some indication that after, iirc, 2037, recipients may be looking at an ~20% decrease in benefits, but the understanding was that S.S. was not an adequate retirement program in isolation (average S.S. benefit something like $13,000 annually), and additional pension/retirement plans are needed. The show was about the latter.
So you can see how someone might have said that (not counting S.S.) pensions are erroneously considered a right.
You know, this seems like a good place to bring this up-- right now, I can't imagine wanting to keep going (floe, not flow, btw) in the face of unpleasant helplessness or episodes of dementia that keep getting more frequent. I expect many people have this opinion in youth and middle age, and drop it as they get older.
The possible counterargument is a slow suicide of heavy drinking or something similar. Or possibly a less explicit manifestation of the loss of the will to live. Looking at very elderly people whose mindset I understand in my own family, that loss of will has shown up a few times, in people in their 90s.
There is an alternative to a demanding full-time schedule, which is either part-time work or less demanding work, which will obviously be less well-paid. Solitude and indifference are enemies in old age.
I don't have links handy, but last I looked, retiring at 70 instead of 67 with penalties before 65 instead of 62 leaves social security viable indefinitely under realistic assumptions for the economy. Decreased quality of life manifests as an increase in suicide or addiction-- I do not know whether being retired helps with either of these rates.
The constraint is either an obligation to save a considerable amount during working life, or a tax burden on existing workers-- the demographics of the decreasing worker:retiree ratio is the problem. Skilled immigration is a possible solution, and could be used to partly offset the increase in retirement age.
25: and there was some indication that after, iirc, 2037, recipients may be looking at an ~20% decrease in benefits,
We've belabored this before, but this represents much, much better financial health than almost any other system you can think of. Plus it is much healthier than the situation before the relatively painless fix applied in the early '80s. The utter scale of demagoguery on SS has been breathtaking, not to mention the fatuous participation of the mainstream political media.
26: I do agree that as a society we have lost our way to death. Do not have a simple solution, however. And of course if you mention it politically, ZOMG! Death Panels!
28: The simplest way to death would be to feed all old people a nonstop diet of pumpple cakes. It would have the added benefit of stimulating the Turducken-esque dessert sectors of the economy!
Busted link: http://www.foodaphilia.com/2010/10/pumpple-cake.html
26: And related to the new front-page post there is an argument to be made that generally delayed timing of having children is consistent with a later retirement.
In part the ratio problem is most severe some X years after a society undergoes "demographic transition". And having a latent demand baby boom after a cataclysmic worldwide depression and war don't help matters much either. But if you look at the number it stabilizes a bit (and the baby boomlet helps somewhat ... as long as the economy can produce an adequate number of jobs).
27: Okay, but that wasn't my point. My point was that regardless of the health or ill-health of S.S., it's inadequate as a sole means of support in retirement.
We could, it is true, try to make S.S. more robust, but I don't see that happening in this country. As it is, we have to protect it from privatization.
32.1: OK, yes. Agree with that.
about public pension programs -- for public employees -- and the troubles they have
Assume 15% growth rates and you're fine. And it will be someone else's problem at the time of payout. What could go wrong?
the Diane Rehm show was specifically about public pension programs
Did it discuss the fact that public employees in many states are wholly dependent on these programs, as they do not contribute to Social Security?
34: Ha. I am not an actuary. The panelists on the show Stanley links to spoke of 8% returns, then something about people being upset at a mere 4%, and it was a tad confusing, but there was a bunch of stuff about the employer contributing, and all I could think was: what about those of us who are not in employer-provided retirement plans? We have been stupid in our life plan arrangements, have we not? (Image of bashing individual persons over the head: you have to join a company, an institution or a profit maker, in a salaried position, or you will be eating cat food at age 75, you stupid!)
The constraint is either an obligation to save a considerable amount during working life, or a tax burden on existing workers-- the demographics of the decreasing worker:retiree ratio is the problem. Skilled immigration is a possible solution
Or ditch the ceiling on payroll taxes. I really don't like immigration based solutions. At some point (preferably yesterday) we need to start on solutions assuming a stable population along of the lines of what we have right now.
The constraint is either an obligation to save a considerable amount during working life
I missed this when it originally appeared upthread at 26, mostly because the rest of 26 seemed to wander in a way in a way I couldn't make out.
There was some discussion in the Diane Rehm panel of the program in place in some (?) European countries -- in Britain? I don't recall -- of a three-tiered system:
(1) a Social Security-like system, mandatory, for very basic emergency retirement coverage
(2) a second-tier, also mandatory contribution program not unlike a 401(k) or IRA or what have you
(3) a third-tier voluntary program of supplemental retirement/pension plan.
We have (1) and (3) here, but lack the second, and this is a big problem. Maybe we could correct that.
Whoa. Sorry for the single-line posting there. Didn't mean to be posting a bulletin.
11:....but rights are just things we declare as a society.
I could hardly disagree more with this. If true, prior to the US civil war owning black people was a right, and the people so owned had no rights.
I don't see how 41 contradicts the quoted bit.
Fundamental construct. No one ever has the right to own another human. The fact that it was allowed by the legal regime at the time does not change that.
If we pulled out the racism part of the whole thing and made it more fair, then could I own somebody? Because all of this leasing we do now gets old.
The racism thing only came up after the Enlightenment. Before that race wasn't really the issue. I'm coming up blank on the fairness part.
No one ever has the right to own another human.
For most of recorded history, people had the right to own another human.
about public pension programs -- for public employees -- and the troubles they have
Did it discuss the facts that those pensions were often negotiated* instead of pay raises or other benefits and that if the states had invested the appropriate amounts in bonds and safer stocks, there would be no or at least a much smaller problem? And very important point about public employees not paying into SS, which Diane Rehm may know, but most people don't.
*I know I'm a broken record on this point, but you sign a contract for something, then you're on the hook. Plan accordingly. Private employers are worse; they raped their pension funds to pump up their share prices during the boom times and now whine about greedy workers and their sense of entitlement.
I disagree. The legal framework allowed them to do so.
But rights are *explicitly* socio-legal constructs. Without a legal framework, nobody has a right to anything. It's just a Hobbesian war of all against all.
The alternative to outright ownership is
i) legal limits on mobility, most simply an internal passport or through a complex system of residency permits for anyplace decent
ii) stronger obligations of debtors to their creditors
In Europe, serfs needed their lord's permission to leave his land, and had to pay rent on land they farmed for themselves.
Or ditch the ceiling on payroll taxes.
Right. In fact, it only needs to be raised a little (I don't know the figure off the top of my head) to cover the existing gap.
I've very likely told this story before, but that's not going to stop me. When we were explaining the concept of Social Security to my 6-year-old niece, I said, "So right now, the money I pay goes to help take care of your grandpa and when I get older and you're working, the money you'll pay in will help take care of me." To which she shouted, "Yay!" and threw her arms around me.
I feel the same way about Emerson.
47: You could listen to the Diane Rehm program -- it's an hour long. All those things were alluded to, but it was a fairly broad-ranging discussion, covering state as well as federal employees, the effects of the stock market on all of this, and so on; and they opened it to listener questions halfway through, which is good, but does cut down on the experts' discussion.
52: Probably the sweetest story ever told about Social Security!
51. Really? I'll look, but only about 5% have income above 100k, and the fraction of income which is salary drops as people earn more.
It would be nice if that were a solution, but I don't think wage taxes at the current rate are enough. Taxing noncash bennies, options and dividends for SS is unrealistic IMO, the fine print will always be such as to allow untaxed compensation at the top.
49: But rights are *explicitly* socio-legal constructs. Without a legal framework, nobody has a right to anything.
Yes, and I hope we're not going to have to repeat this too many times.
55: OK, looks like my memory was faulty. Raising the limit cuts the shortfall drastically, but you have to eliminate it to fix the whole problem.
If the rich paid taxes on the same share of national income as they did in 1983, 40 percent of the funding shortfall would disappear. (If it was good enough for Ronald Reagan, how can they complain?) But they should pay more. Most Americans want to see the cap on taxable income lifted entirely. If both employers and employees paid the 6.2 percent Social Security tax on the entire salary of employees earning more than $106,800, the entire funding shortfall would be eliminated.
I think that when I first learned about raising the ceiling it would have taken care of most or all of the problem, but that's no longer the case.
Also good: Ten reasons not to raise the retirement age.
55: Here are some scenarios from Ezra Klein. Now if the economy never really gets going again all bets are certainly off.
I must admit that I am extremely frustrated on how the narrative on this has been skewed. What's the solvency of the motherfucking military?
47.last: Indeed. One of the probable contributors to the Black Monday stock market plunge in 1987 was program trading. At some point it came out that the organization managing my company's pension was one of the possible "culprits". As if that were necessary to meet long-term low-return obligations.
Even though it would do the job, raising the SS contribution limit while benefits are still capped seems like it undermines part of the structure and rationale of SS, of being a self-funding program. The argument about a lesser share of national income being subject to SS also seems a little off - with the benefits capped, having someone over the cap make more money should be neither here nor there as far as paying for everyone's SS benefits is concerned.
Unfortunately I don't have time to stick around and talk this over (perhaps fortunately, actually), but 56 is at odds with my understanding.
57.last: Thanks. Items (5) through (9) are especially good.
61: Another time, then. It's a pretty fundamental conversation to be had, and it can be done without any rancor, of course, mostly just a definition of terms. Maybe later.
56 is also at odds with the explicit foundation of the Declaration of Independence, as well as, basically, the Enlightenment, but hey, none of us here are originalists, right?
From the link in 64:
Blurring the lines between natural and legal rights, U.S. statesman James Madison believed that some rights, such as trial by jury, are social rights, arising neither from natural law nor from positive law but from the social contract from which a government derives its authority.[2] The question of which (if any) rights are natural and which are merely legal is an important one in philosophy and politics. Critics of the concept of natural rights argue that the only rights that exist are legal rights, while proponents of the concept of natural rights say that documents such as the United States Declaration of Independence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights demonstrate the usefulness of recognizing natural rights.
So it's easy to say that we all agree on the big rights, but it's not exactly black and white beyond that.
But no, sure, I think it's weird to talk about even Hobbes not asserting natural rights. He just didn't have a very expansive view of what they consisted of.
69 to 67.
The natural vs. legal rights distinction is a worthwhile one -- of course -- but we'd have to get a little detailed about it, and I'm off for a while. Suffice it to say that 49 is not idiotic on its face by any stretch of the imagination (I wouldn't have thrown Hobbes into the matter, just because), but there are important questions to be raised about the notion of natural rights, and there are whole fields of political philosophy dedicated to this. Basically, legal documents have attempted to codify some of what we have decided to consider natural rights, and they've done that precisely because only legal rights actually count as rights in those of our societies that are governed according to the rule of law.
Well, look. You can assert the existence of natural (god-given) rights, and certainly there's a solid history of those assertions. But if no legal or societal authority exists to guarantee them, then they are as real as your right to grow wings and fly. And since they largely *didn't* exist prior to the Enlightenment, they seem pretty obviously social creations.
71: Apo is very, very right on this one. "Natural rights" are a fundamentally incoherent concept--albeit a socially useful one at times given other worse malignancies of human thought and behavior.
I believe that we are in agreement, or at least I would concur with 71. It not being midnight, and I not being drunk in a dorm room somewhere will not become pedantic on the issue.
and it can be done without any rancor
It not being midnight, and I not being drunk in a dorm room somewhere will not become pedantic on the issue
You have several hours. Find a dorm room and start drinking.
I'm a little surprised that there have been no takers on this topic. I suppose it's true that on the level of blog commenting, it's in the realm of midnight dorm room bullshit sessions, but on the other hand, it's not as though nothing has, historically, been said: it's a live debate.
The original question had been whether people had a right to a retirement income. I find it very hard to understand that in terms of natural, unalienable rights.
Don't get me wrong, as far as I'm concerned, we should all live in societies that support the full spectrum of ages: elders should be honored and respected, and certainly shouldn't be reduced to eating cat food, so society should be set up in such a way as to transfer resources to seniors without leaving them to fend for themselves.
I have now talked myself into (the form of) an argument for retirement income as a 'natural' right, if by that we mean a human right. Which should be codified more robustly than it is.
You'd want a general right to enough income to eat or just for old people because Fancy Feast is harder on their digestion?
A general right to enough income to eat better than Fancy Feast. How's that? Was my position confusing?
...elders should be honored and respected....
Let's not take any position that we might regret, were someone to adduce, say, John McCain or the state of Florida.
Flippanter wants your elders to eat Meow Mix.
I'm afraid they count. It's a universal right. Sometimes I think it should be means-tested. Hasn't that idea been floated? I forget what the objection is.
In any event, honor and dignity to all persons regardless of income earned during so-called economically productive years. That we are establishing the worth of persons according to their economic productivity (defined willy-nilly) is a travesty.
I'm a little surprised that there have been no takers on this topic.
Huh? This is the 82nd comment in this thread, most of which is on-topic.
But if no legal or societal authority exists to guarantee them, then they are as real as your right to grow wings and fly
Apo is stealthily working towards a position of "air traffic control is unconstitutional".
And since they largely *didn't* exist prior to the Enlightenment, they seem pretty obviously social creations.
Well, the natural rights position would be that they always existed but generally weren't asserted or protected, yes? Just like the speed of light existed before anyone was able to measure it, or even formulate the concept of light having a speed.
But office workers retiring at 65 and living until 80?
Whoo-hoo, a whole fifteen years sponging off the state after paying taxes into it for only 45 years! And with the last five years spend in ever decreasing health and more pain as the cancers and heart diseases and mind destroyers hit! I can't wait!
Well, the natural rights position would be that they always existed but generally weren't asserted or protected, yes? Just like the speed of light existed before anyone was able to measure it, or even formulate the concept of light having a speed.
That would work if instead of "natural rights" we were talking about "humanist prejudices".
We may be deep into chicken-and-egg territory now.
And because the condition of man (as hath been declared in the precedent chapter) is a condition of war of every one against every one, in which case every one is governed by his own reason, and there is nothing he can make use of that may not be a help unto him in preserving his life against his enemies; it followeth that in such a condition every man has a right to every thing, even to one another's body. And therefore, as long as this natural right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man, how strong or wise soever he be, of living out the time which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live.
it followeth that in such a condition every man has a right to every thing, even to one another's body.
PUA skills were different in the seventeenth century.
All of us will die, we should not forget this. We must be in peace with God for that day.