New York’s public system is fully funded. It’s pretty easy… you just fund it.
Social Security is a pretty amazing system. Inflation and a fixed cap for taxation has led to a relatively minor revenue shortfall, 90s welfare reform pushing welfare recipients to SS Disabilty, and a few other factors driving the spend side higher. We also tax those benefits for many, and fund Medicare through premium payments.
You need to raise taxes and push out the the cash flow issue a decade. Then demographic trends fix it. Instead, we’re exploring this cruel & destructive approach, which will trigger a depression in the end. Between housing defaults, implosion of medical facilities as Medicare funding gets slashed, and god knows what else, we’re damaging the country.
Demographics is the core thing that dooms all current forms of pensions, no matter if government, stonks or people just hoarding cash or other assets - in the end it's all fundamentally "IOUs" assuming that in 30, 40 years someone will be willing to trade that IOU from decades past into care. The one sole exception is real estate because a roof over the head doesn't need to be traded to be worth something for survival.
Up until now, this expectation has largely worked out over the millennia. People had ample children (by necessity), so there was always a healthy supply of working power to back the value of IOUs with work or consumables, old people plainly didn't live long (up until the 1800s, average life expectancy was barely 40!), and the young generation used to get at least some scraps of inheritance.
But at the moment, this is all broken across Western societies. People barely have children due to a number of factors (the pill, demands of employers, working too long hours, housing shortages, exploding costs of living, the economic and social poly-crises ever since 2001 9/11 ...) which will throw wrenches into the core promise of someone being there to trade the IOUs, old people live way too long (we're at about 80-ish years now) for any system to be sustainable because you can only get about 45 to 50 years worth of full-time working out of a human but they'll be living double that on the dime of society, and by the time my generation can hope to get some assistance in starting our families in form of inheritance we'll be long past the time where we could actually have used it.
Long term we're fucked, and I'd hope our governments show to be more deserving of our trust than tech and finance bros.
> (up until the 1800s, average life expectancy was barely 40!),
This is mostly tangential to your point, but life expectancy for those that survived the first five years of life has never been 40. The averages for older populations are massively dragged down by the deaths of babies and small children either in childbirth or due to infectious diseases.
There’s alot of things that just aren’t correct in your analysis. Most obviously, you don’t understand what life expectancy is.
The US doesn’t have a fertility problem, we have interest in immigration and do a great job at keeping people poor and ignorant.
Lack of inheritance as far as that goes is mostly because for regular people, the estate tax is a casino. If you’re lucky to die quickly, your kids let stuff. If not, you’ll end up expending your assets on long term care as we don’t have a rational healthcare system, and rich people can use trusts to avoid that landmine.
Social Security is a pretty amazing system. Inflation and a fixed cap for taxation has led to a relatively minor revenue shortfall, 90s welfare reform pushing welfare recipients to SS Disabilty, and a few other factors driving the spend side higher. We also tax those benefits for many, and fund Medicare through premium payments.
You need to raise taxes and push out the the cash flow issue a decade. Then demographic trends fix it. Instead, we’re exploring this cruel & destructive approach, which will trigger a depression in the end. Between housing defaults, implosion of medical facilities as Medicare funding gets slashed, and god knows what else, we’re damaging the country.