It’s not just mental ability it’s a set of perverse incentives: the old robbing the future of the young, instead of planting trees whose shade the old will never personally enjoy.

Fortunately insolvency in this scenario mean that they will only be able to afford to pay around 3/4 of promised benefits.

Closing that budget gap is a problem that will need to be dealt with, but it's not impossible to fix and it's a fairly long way away. There are a lot of proposals going around for how to fix it and those will become more politically palatable as it gets closer.

What is the justification? Why can someone vote for a future they're not likely have to endure?

We don't allow under 18s to vote, so clearly some age restrictions are legitimate.

What I’ve seen where I’m at is many of the old people who organize don’t want to give anything up to a next generation. They want all the accolades for themselves. So they’re happy to have young people do the work but aren’t comfortable letting them lead while teaching them the skills.

There is another variable, the rate of change. When a Venetian Doge was 80 years old, the world was.. more or less the same as when he was 20.

Contrast that to now, where an 80 year old in his twenties likely did not even have colour TV.

Can you explain how is the example of Venetian republic relevant for something like a massive multi-cultural, multi-racial federation in 21st century? One that's led by 100s of old people not just ten rich family heads?

nothing, didn't you read what he wrote? he's advocating to build more of them.

At that point, the blame lies with the electorate for choosing to re-elect somebody who has a proven track record of harming them. You can't realistically prevent people from making bad choices in a democracy, at some point the voters have to have accountability for who they choose to vote for. Restricting who they are allowed to vote for is liable to backfire if you're arbitrarily removing the best candidates from the pool, especially out of a misguided belief that term limits prevent elderly politicians from taking power (yet Trump was elected for his first term at 70, his second term at 78, and Biden for his first term at 78... because, allegedly, disqualifying 55-year-old Obama in 2016 was somehow meant to help prevent geriatric politicians from being in power).

I don't think a form of RCV would have a terribly significant impact on name recognition and incumbent advantage, which I think the are the main drivers of why we keep reelecting people who are obviously no longer competent. Feinstein's walking corpse being constantly reelected despite California having jungle primaries with many viable alternatives is a good example of how an alternate voting method does not solve this problem. It also wouldn't fix appointed positions, especially judges or filling vacated seats.

There are other great reasons to change our voting system! I just think it doesn't solve this exact problem, while an upper age limit does.

I'd say party leadership endorsing a 78 year old candidate for US Senate is not how voting and elections ought to work - I'd say it's a pretty big problem. You're welcome to agree or disagree with that, but more relevant to the context of this comment thread, it is not a problem that would be solved by congressional term limits.

> young people today are bigoted and feel they deserve more than all generations that ever preceded them throughout all of history.

Each generation doing materially better than the previous one used to be a widely agreed upon goal in the United States. Perhaps not really relevant to this comment thread.

> How else would you deal with people who are too old to do the job, and too senile to realize they can no longer perform and should abdicate?

Mandatory retirement age? Voters being adults and fucking paying attention, instead of acting like children and believing everything they see on TV and social media?

That article is calling for an additional estate tax. That's sounds reasonable to me.

But you seem to be talking about taking the retirement savings and homes of people who are using them to live.

You find different numbers in different places, but the median retirement savings for boomers is under $200,000. That's a lot of money, but it needs to last ~15 years or so, years where they're likely to have reduced or no capacity to work.

A lot of old people have paid-off houses, which is a major asset. You could take those (e.g., by taxing them out), but then where do the old people on a small, fixed income live?

The attitude seems to be, "to hell with them, who cares?"

But I think a lot of people care: the old people themselves, of course. The people who love them. And everyone self-aware enough to realize they too hope to become old.

No. Term limits have no bearing on the skill floor, only the skill ceiling. By capping employment at 8 years, you place a hard limit on how good your employees can become. However, removing that limit does not magically make all of your employees good. You are still responsible for choosing to employ competent employees. If, after 8 years, an employee is still not good at their job, you have the option to fire them. That American voters are currently not exercising the option to fire bad employees is its own problem, and not a problem that is reasonably solved by mandatory firings, because the underlying cause is still there and voters who are inclined to vote for bad employees will simply choose to employ new bad employees.

The US birth rate began to drop in the 1960s. [0] At the time we were a more self-contained economy.

Since then, there are fewer births per capita, and we've opened up global markets for labor and resources.

If you have fewer people aging into markets for goods and services as time goes on, you have to monetize them more intensely in order to maintain revenues. At the same time, other markets (China, India, etc.) offered relatively-high GDP growth (and thus return on investment) compared to the US [1], since their labor costs are lower and the needs of then-developing nations were cheaper to meet.

The result is a worker that's expected to produce more profit to compete with those elsewhere, while also being more intensely monetized through their consumption habits. If they can't produce enough profit to compete with workers elsewhere, they just don't have the income necessary to be more intensely monetized, so their standard of living drops.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/datasets/global-metrics/countrie...

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?name_...

"institutions" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. This often means bloated bureaucracy. I'm not against big government in any way or form, but inefficient, bloated bureaucracy with a bunch of mandarins doing the real governing since all the office holders get rotated out after their term limits hit, doesn't seem like a good solution.

With term limits individuals in power are motivated to pass laws that help them find their next job.

There wasn't a speculative economy based on increasingly distant balance sheets.

The stock market was initially created to crowdfund big investments. It's still that in theory, but in practice it's something very different now.

In a similar manner to bastardizing the stock market, the national budget is run in any way that is short term beneficial and long term nebulous.

You can read this exact criticism of democracy in „Athenaion Politeia“, (The Old Oligarch), 5th century BCE. There is nothing new under the sun.

It always worked like this. Democracy is simply an incredibly destructive form of government.

So why is it different now? Costs go up because of inflation (government deficit spending) and the ever-greater burden of government.

By law is how we got to where we currently are. There's no reason to think that would change. You'd have to trick all the people who are old (plus all the people who realize they will get old too) to vote away their assets, income, and power.

Unrest will just harden the people who see your cause as unjust against it. That will be a strong majority of people, so will go no where.

Revolution seems highly unlikely to succeed -- it would be unpopular and you'd have to turn much of the military/police to your side.

Frankly, I think the push of the idea of the intergenerational conflict is a con. It will not lead to anything getting better, but when people are angry and scared, they become vulnerable.

Be wary of anyone offering big, impossible promises. They'll be sticking their hands into your wallet soon enough.

An awful lot of young people are starting businesses. Look at all the people under 30 becoming billionaires. This just didn't happen when I was young.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2025/12/22/why-there-...

>It's going to be hard to sell policies that disenfranchise old people...

Not at all. Remember how before he got dementia the president ran on an antidementia platform?

> That's why I think this is all a scam. We are, almost all of us, old people or people who hope to get old. This is an effort to get us all upset enough at each other that we don't stop to realize we're fighting ourselves.

Not at all, it's just a fact that old people have arranged things so that old/young is simply more important than left/right. Old people are absolutely committed to protecting and boosting the stock/real-estate markets that young people are locked out of. The market is not the economy.. except that actually for old people with assets, it basically is. Youth may have left/right preferences, but establishment Left/Right are really just Old, and both have clear and stable intent to inflict economic violence on everyone else.

> It you want to unravel the scam, follow the money.

You're suggesting I'm a shil? The money trail is simple.. people don't have much and things are getting worse. Who's in charge now? Who was in charge before that? And who was in charge before that? Who paid off the people in charge? Who continuously benefits and who suffers?

> If they're self-made, they earned the praise.

They aren’t and they didn’t.

> Being a self-made billionaire means they created a billion dollars of value. They didn't take it from you or anyone else.

Nobody is a “self made” billionaire. That value you’re talking about didn’t just spring into existence. It had to come from somewhere. There is always a source.

Who flew the rocket? Who built the rocket? Who built the parts for the rocket? Who mixed the fuel?

Building big ambitious things is a good thing. But consolidating an amount of money that nobody could ever reasonably spend into the hands of one person (especially when that money is just the excess value produced by the workers) is unethical and unneeded.

> Being a self-made billionaire means they created a billion dollars of value.

two of the people on the list did it via online gambling. Which is by definition a zero-sum game. No value was created.

Musk started with a $20,000 loan from his family. You could buy a used car for $20,000, no emerald mine and slaves required.

Musk parlayed the loan into $trillions.

They paid for Old Age Insurance, and they reached old age, so they get to collect.

Social Security as an insurance product is fiction, but playing into the fiction helps it survive to do the thing it was built for: keep the elderly out of the poor houses / off the street.

Payout rates drop at higher income, and portions of the payout are taxable at higher income, so it's not like it's completely income/wealth blind.

Because they were promised it - fundamentally leaving the rich out of the social safety net doesn't even get us much and administrating the distinction costs money, and I am no fan of the wealthiest get additional benefits.

I think solving inequality will not be about reducing access to said safety nets but increasing them for all.

If you work for 40 years, chances are you will have accumulated some assets. I'm not sure that "sell your house and cars to pay for food" is a policy that will be popular.

Equally those same people have paid taxes for 40 years, paid into social security (to the benefit of their elders) and so on.

Keeping them in the work-force is largely undesirable. A job occupied by a 70 year old is a job not occupied by someone younger. If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around. (using imprecise simple math).

Look, most all of us will get old and eventually claim on social security or whatever. Politically just "ending that" is pretty much a non-starter to anyone who has been contributing for any length of time. Even fiddling with the edges of it (raising the retirement age) will get you voted out of office.

> Why the hell are they able to collect on that?

People in the higher income brackets get far less back on SS than they paid in.

Go to bogleheads and read for awhile - you get an amazing view into the “rich” in various stages and it’s eye-opening in a number of ways.

You find those who have saved so much they have no hope of spending it all and yet are still scared to spend. Those who spend months worrying if they can buy a new car to replace their 25 year old Camry and yet they live on social security alone while having mandatory IRA disbursements in the thousands.

Social security et al should never have been sold as “savings for the future” and just been another tax.

SS has to pay everyone to be viable. If you make it more complicated the politics turn into a nightmare.

> They have three new or late-model vehicles.

Depends on geography of course, but it's not rare at all for boomers to have this many houses as a normal part of how they experienced middle-class life. As a group they are not only more likely to have rental/investment property, but also more likely to have multiple such properties. Why would they sell? They can get you to pay for all their services, and vote as a block to deny and remove services elsewhere.

It was set up as neither.

It's a taxpayer-funded insurance policy, where the risk is you being alive without a way to earn a living. We have effectively managed that risk for a very large portion of the people who are collecting on that insurance policy by switching over to a service economy where most jobs do not require the physical labor that an elderly person cannot safely do. Furthermore, they're also the portion of the population with the longest time to have accumulated assets.

If you want to keep the insurance policy sustainable for the next generation - who is also paying into it - you need to treat it like an insurance policy. If you allow people to make any and all claims against the funds backing an insurance policy, the funds will eventually be depleted as there will be more people withdrawing from it than paying in. You also have to account for the opportunity cost of the people paying into that system not paying into something else, like our ballooning national debt, or the debts that many Americans of working age have to take on to maintain a decent standard of living.

> Bollocks. We complain because jobs are being occupied by the oldsters, and now you want them to stay in their jobs even longer?

I'd just tax it at 100% unless they declare bankruptcy. The US national debt skyrocketed during their lifetimes. Mathematically speaking, they did not pay enough in tax to support the spending that their duly-elected officials enacted. They also didn't, mathematically speaking, have enough children to make up the difference in future taxpayers, either. The American birth rate never recovered after 1970. Someone's got to pay off those bills, and if the numbers comparing the Boomers to Millennials at the same age say anything, they say "the Millennials will not have the money to pay off their parents' government debt."

Is that harsh? I don't know. I do know that your children's generation is supposed to have it better than you, and by pretty much every objective measure, the Boomers did not do that for their children, at least not economically. So it's time for them to put up.

> If the couple you're pillorying is so wealthy, then most of their Social Security is being taxed, and they're paying higher Medicare premiums as well. And their house? As they get older and require nursing care, they'll end up liquidating it (or Medicaid will take it).

Why should they be receiving Social Security at all? Same with Medicare. This is the demographic that has more collected wealth than any other age cohort. If they do, in fact, need government help, they can prove their need, like you have to with unemployment insurance or Medicaid.

> The average retiree receives around $25k per year in SS benefits. That's not a ton of money.

Then those who don't really need it won't miss it. Those who do will have a more sustainable program to support them.

People do it all the time. One man companies are commonplace. They come to my door now and then, selling magazine subscriptions, offering to clean my driveway, do yard work, tree trimming, exterminating, carry off junk, do estate sales for you, and so forth.

I remember one guy who had a one man outfit that replaced broken garage door springs. It was all he did. He had a trunk full of springs.

Any decent real estate agent has a rolodex of these people, who are hired to do what is necessary to prep a house for sale.

Why do you pay insurance for anything? So the funds are there if you need them.

The goal is not to maximize return, it's to guarantee a check that keeps you from being destitute. That's it. That's the whole point. Not limitless growth, not a nice bit of sugar from Uncle Sam every month to supplement millions of dollars in assets. To keep you from being dying in the street as an elderly person.

If we're going to call the current abuse of OASDI a legitimate use of insurance, then I want to be able to get my home protection policy company to help me out on a down payment for a house. I've paid in, after all. It's the least they can do.

> Kind of a strawman though, innit?

Not at all. It's the primary reason why communes fail.

We already have welfare programs. Nobody is starving to death in the US.

You know... janitorial work really is an excellent example:

- Some labor is easy both to offshore and to automate -- e.g. factory work

- Some labor can be offshored a lot more easily than it can be automated -- this causes at least a practical problem for the "nice UBI" countries. I'm struggling to think of particularly good examples...

- Some labor can be automated more easily than it can be offshored, e.g. self-driving

- Some labor is "rare enough" that it can potentially be well-paid -- my intuition says construction and repair, especially with the aid of machines

But janitorial labor is low-status, is required constantly, needs to be done on-site, and is really hard for a robot.

So a particularly good UBI test: how do you hire janitors?

It's not necessarily impossible -- for example, if a few shifts of janitorial labor could double this "decent baseline," would people pick it up? Would this leave it affordable?

There are points in history where the productivity increases were more equitably spread, and we still got lasers, microwaves, MRI, mRNA, microchips, the internet, etc, etc, from national funding no less.

A milder version would be: People are paid based on the marginal cost of replacing them. But still, either of those is a far cry from claiming it's "the value they create".

It's not hard to show either. Imagine you're on an island and have been gored in the stomach by a wild animal, and a skilled surgeon can save your life. Most people would instantly agree that continued existence is of immense "value".

However after making that decision, you discover that you're on an island where almost everyone is a surgeon and the going-rate is much lower than you expected. Are we supposed to believe that your new knowledge somehow reaches backwards in time and retroactively changes the "value" of Not Dying? No, that'd be crazy. Valuation is never the same as price-point.

> the maximum extraction ownership can get

And people demand the maximum pay they can get. It's the Law of Supply and Demand.

Consider this. You hire Bob for $10/hr, and he produces $100/hr in value. What's going to happen? Your competitor hires him away from for $20/hr. Then another competitor hires Bob away for $30/hr. This proceeds until Bob gets paid about $85/hr. The ROI of hiring Bob is somewhere around 15%.

There's a good reason why the vast bulk of the American workforce is paid much more than minimum wage.

Ok, branching from your previous post again, why isn't what you're describing happening?

https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-wages...

> Elon Musk stopped producing value quite a while ago

No evidence of that.

> Everyone who's ever spent 6 months in big tech knows how easily compensation is divorced from value.

You could always sell your yourself to a big tech company with your expertise in who are the value ones. A person with that skill would be very valuable to a company.

Count his tweets over the last few years, WaPo did a big story on it recently, its like 70 tweets/day. Then divide his remaining attention over the number of companies he's running. Or look at the effectiveness of his management of DOGE which is the most public/transparent example we have.

I do think up until 2020 he was useful, there's a reason nobody else made electric cars or self landing rockets work. But most of his wealth accumulation has been since then.