I see, I thought we were talking about having it better economically. I mean yes, civil rights is a wonderful thing. Still gotta eat. But I agree, in certain respects things have improved in the US. Economic health isn’t one of them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some golden age fool. I have zero desire to live in the past. But it’s important to acknowledge our regressing trends and turn things around. After all, the future should continue to get better.
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The point is, for non-white, non-male people, there’s not a lot of time periods that are hospitable to visit, should a time-machine be invented tomorrow.
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Totally agree. I know Louis CK is deservedly persona non grata these days, but his bit about being white and time travel remains a classic.
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I wasn’t referring to @Boundegar’s point, but the fact remains that by a relatively conservative estimate there is no real issue with SS until 2035 (about the time Gen Xers will be the bulk of beneficiaries – as expected, screwed again!). That’s keeping everything as-is, including the age when you start collecting. That date which can be pushed further into the future by raising the cap and/or raising the withholding rate by tiny amounts over a 10-year period.
You’re correct about the larger demographic and labour-market issues (I’m not so worried about the reproductive one unless anti-immigrant sentiment reaches 1920s levels) which will come home to roost 5-10 years sooner than SS will hit anything approaching a crisis point. Unless the country makes a sharp change away from “free” market fundamentalism by 2025, SS will be affected by political machinations, because the trust fund (along with all other social programmes) will be used to fund the “neoliberal UBI” I’ve described elsewhere – conservatives will make it a condition.
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I didn’t think you were, I was just connecting the two points because I don’t think I made mine well in my first comment to @Boundegar.
How long can we afford to wait to begin doing that though, and will working Americans be making enough to afford it? I suppose my question is, if wage stagnation continues while the economy, inflation and costs of living grows, at some point where will the money from entitlements come from? It seems to me, and perhaps I’m wrong, that at some point wages have to go up or all the wealth will wind up hoarded by people who’ve perfected not paying taxes.
Good point.
We should start doing it now, but we won’t. The Boomers have their “I’ve got mine, Jack” generational attitude, the Millenials aren’t thinking about old age, and Xers don’t have political clout. If nothing is done then Gen Xers and younger people will start seeing their SS insurance benefits reduced (I think 77% of current inflation-adjusted benefits is the projected 2035 crisis point), and since the retirement savings rate is hair-raisingly low in this country that will mean a lot of people having some very rough golden years (though not, I would add, as rough as it was for old people pre-New Deal).
The wealth is already being hoarded, but Social Security is funded by withholding from paycheques. Wages will continue go up for approx. 20% of the population (the above-the-API winners of the economy) but will go down for everyone else – SS withholding will be applied to all of that, which is still a lot of money to keep the SS trust fund going.
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I get the impression, which could be wrong, that people under 35 or even 40 lack confidence in existing social institutions, including the economy, and that that lack of confidence seems roughly inversely proportional to age. Which is to say, I’m not sure they don’t think about it, but that it seems too uncertain to them to make any plans. Obviously this is an extremely imprudent attitude, but it does seems prevalent among demographics normally considered Mellenial and Gen Z.
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I desperately want to be a rational optimist. I’m forced to admit that my effective optimism about the future is based primarily on ignorance, a lack of imagination, and wishful thinking.
From a rational point of view, I see a trend where technology gives individuals more power. This trend is balanced by certain individuals or groups attempting to sequester more power (or all power) for themselves.
On the “individual power” side, that could mean something as tragically mundane as an individual with a technologically advanced firearm murdering a crowd of people in minutes. It could mean individuals getting their hands on nuclear weapons for acts of unspeakable terrorism. It could even mean something as apocalyptic as an individual using advanced biotechnology to engineer a custom plague that could wipe out millions.
On the “power sequestering” side, we have technical entities like Google, Facebook, the NSA, etc. using surveillance technologies to spy on populations, using the information gleaned from this spying to influence, suppress, or generally control the behavior of those populations. (The excuse always being that such monitoring and control is necessary to counteract burgeoning “individual power.”) Then of course we already have governments with enough nuclear technology to wipe out the human species (see “Nuclear Winter”).
Sources of energy are another way to think about “power.” Renewable sources of energy like wind or solar seem like a fairly positive way to accumulate “individual power,” so that people could loosen the hold of utilities, Big Petroleum, etc. At the same time, these same groups seek to limit, discourage, and co-opt such decentralization. Imagine a more speculative scenario where a vast new power source (e.g. fusion) became available – the groups controlling this might have to be so small and concentrated that they ended up with a stranglehold on society.
Where’s the middle ground here? Can there in fact be a middle ground? With enough technological power, you only need one single bad actor to precipitate a human extinction scenario.
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That, too (currently helped along by Uncle Vlad). In general, though, whatever their generation most Westerners under age 40 don’t give a whole lot of thought to their own old age.
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With a philantropist like him at the steering wheel, Micro Soft would never have become as ruthless a company!
What is this? I thought we weren’t watching Woody Allen anymore
How about just a year and a half ago when Obama was President. We were trending up in many ways. Today, under Trump we are trending down in almost every single indicator of a healthy society.
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Is Bill on some sort of publicity tour? YouTubers? Ellen?
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but I it seems most of the additional wealth is going to people who are already above the ~$128k social security wage base maximum.
So additional income gains to that group won’t do much to put more money into social security.
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You’re probably right, but it still won’t create a crisis until at least 2035 – especially if we raise that maximum to something more progressive now.
My main point there was that, despite the cap, it’s harder to avoid paying into Social Security than it is to avoid paying income tax.
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I love how Bill is still a huge geek. 62 years old, a kabillion dollars, probably been interviewed many hundreds of times and his legs are still bouncing just like the spaz who’s typing this comment. Funny how you don’t see that on video very often which is probably why it stood out so clearly to me.
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Actual health is also not one of them. In every measure from life expectancy to maternal mortality, we’re heading in the wrong direction.
Now excuse me while I try to find a thousand dollars for my latest medical bill.
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LIfe expectancy has gone down .1 years, for two years in a row. For perspective, here’s the chart of US life expectancy since we began counting:
We’ve had dips in life expectancy before, as recently as 1993, but the overall trend hasn’t changed very much.
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Branko Milanovic’s elephant in the room. On the one side it shows the improvement at the bottom but also drop in the middle and working class over the past 30 years which goes a long way to explaining Brexit & Trump.
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