All the cries of ageism but there have been countless leaked reports of US Senators being treated for dementia and clearly cognitively impaired senators still serving. They're doing a weekend at bernies with McConnell right now!
Absolutely there are sharp people >65, but there is no question that cognitive decline starts in middle age and the risk for dementia increases dramatically past 65.
Then there is the argument, which imo is even stronger, of an inverting demographic pyramid and inter generational economic warfare to preserve pensions for people who won't live to see the effects of their policies. This is not at all sustainable and creates misery for the working class who will soon lack sufficient democratic power to vote their way out of it.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what's for dinner, etc..
>Absolutely there are sharp people >65, but there is no question that cognitive decline starts in middle age and the risk for dementia increases dramatically past 65.
I understand what they are defending, but it is still weird to have most of the USA presidents being born before the 50s. They don't have skin in the game. They will be dead before they see the consequences of their policies
Not even that, IMO. In the past when the world was stable for centuries, it made sense to have seniors with a long experience to drive the public, see Roman senators as an example.
Nowadays the world changes so fast it does not make sense anymore.
My grandfather was born when radio was a luxury and died after living through another revolution, the TV. Internet was not so widespread.
While after him I witnessed the rise of TV, the birth of Internet and whatever other media it spawned. It's like living through 4x the advancements of our previous generation.
We can't expect a 70-80 years old to understand the world of today.
The reason our leaders suck is not because they're old, but because democracy selects mostly for charisma, showmanship, and if we're even more cynical - a lack of morals/ethics. Political careers are most expedited by telling people what they want to hear, and by selling yourself out to the highest bidder so you can get funded by corporations and other moneyed interests. A great conman would likely make a great democratic politician. A typical definition of leadership is the four Cs - character, competence, commitment, and courage. The democratic political system doesn't select for that, at all. We want e.g. generals who rose on merit, instead we get lawyers.
As for age itself, there's also a pretty straight forward reason that we tend to pick older leaders. As people age they're generally going to find their younger selves less than desirable - naivete, gullibility, ignorance, and just generally a lack of wisdom. So I'd be terrified of having a leader in e.g. their 30s simply because I don't think they'd have anywhere near the life experience to have accumulated a reasonable base of wisdom. And I suspect as I continue to age, that 30 is going to get pushed higher and higher. Even back in Ancient Rome one could not run for Consul until you were at least 42 years old. And people likely 'grew up' much, much, faster in those times than we do now a days, simply because life was so much more testing.
You are terrified because somewhere deep down, what you want is someone who will act on worldviews similar to your own, and age is a fairly substantial component of that.
Ultimately, perhaps there is a trend, but my observations simply do not match the premise of people monotonically accumulating wisdom as they age, and in fact there are certain types of gullibility that seem to increase with age, such as the willingness to disregard and disparage scientific or objective fact in favor of personal beliefs, and to prioritize social status over signals of expertise/intelligence when judging authority. And don't forget that 80%+ of successful scams are against older people.
I think there are almost definitely tradeoffs between cognitive flexibility versus cumulative lifetime experiences, and we shouldn't discount the former - just look at how utterly dysregulated tech industries are because of out-of-touch representatives who listen to elites over experts in the field.
Age will change your perspective on politics. In general I think humanity's future looks extremely promising. We're on the verge of the automation of all 'basic' cognitive work, finally 'really' unlocking the space frontier, flirting with advanced robotics with unimaginable potential (especially paired with the first advancement) and much more.
But none of these things are going to be brought to us because of politics or politicians. They're being brought to us through technological and economic advancement. And I think the only risk we have along the way is ourselves. So at this point I couldn't care less what a politician's values are - I simply want somebody who won't get us into WW3 or bring us to the verge of it. So if you assume I'm looking for worldview alignment, my 'worldview' would come down to 'please don't screw up so badly that you cause the extinction of humanity.'
Parent's typically aren't in charge of understanding and regulating technology they barely understand, let alone can operate. We need to strip the gerontocracy of their ability to enrich themselves while being incapable of understanding the world around them. The founding fathers were in their 30s.
As a parent a large part of my responsibility is making decisions and regulation about how they are allowed to interact with trends and technology I barely understand.
If you're a parent in 2026 you aren't dealing with the financial issues that are impacting other people who can't be parents because they can't make money, please kindly fuck right off, you're opinion doesn't matter. And you and your kids will be purged.
The average age of the Constitutional Convention was 42 years old. Life expectancy of an adult[1] at that time was only about 48 years old, and the the median age of all American adults 18+ was about 30 (today it is 48).
[1]Avg life expectancy of someone from birth during this time was 37 years old.
> Life expectancy of an adult[1] at that time was only about 48 years old
Where did you see that? I found this article https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2885717/#:~:text=20... which says that in 1790, a 20 year old American white male could expect to live to his early 60s. Interestingly, life expectancy in the US actually went down during the 19th century due to urbanization. One thing you have to watch out when you're looking at numbers like this is that they catalog remaining life expectancy. For example, the chart says "41.4" but you have to add 20 to get the total life expectancy since it's remaining lifespan at age 20.
Yes, in general people place a lot of value in the wisdom that comes with age so long as the person isn’t senile.
Obviously with autocrats this isn’t applicable but there’s nothing inherently nonsensical or inexplicable about why mostly old dudes rule much of the world.
>Yes, in general people place a lot of value in the wisdom
I don't think that holds as an explanation given that 1. there's not a lot of wisdom going around among the geriatric leaders of the world, 2. this is a pretty rapidly increasing trend, not some fact of history.
Historical leaders used to be younger, including after accounting for increased lifespans. Just look at the founding of the American Republic. It's much more a sign of two things. Increased decadence and civilizations that are themselves at the end of their rope, and in democracies in particular a geriatric population that keeps voting itself into power based on their own interests.
I haven’t done the math but I’m assuming if you look at the founding fathers and life expectancy for the general population in the 18th century they would have represented what people in their 60s represent today relative to the rest of the population.
Also you can’t really talk about a geriatric population ‘voting itself into power’ if it makes up such a small proportion of the population. Young people just abstain from voting in western democracies, which is a choice just as much as voting one way or the other is. Yes, a person votes in his own self interest - that’s how that works.
>Yes, a person votes in his own self interest - that’s how that works
No, that's not how that works, some Rousseau might be in order. What early Republicans still recognized is the concept of General Will. That a polity is not just the sum of its individual interests but requires an orientation of each member towards the shared common good. A democracy that is governed by self interest, in which simply put each vote is bought is a democracy in decayed state.
That this doesn't even register with people any more and is perceived as the norm is exactly what I'm talking about when I'm saying that most current democratic nations are at the end of their life. If young people are a demographic minority and each person votes only in their selfish interest the future of the nation is, by definition, dead.That they opt out in that situation is actually rational.
At some point absolutely, but if someone is capable of executing there's no reason for them not to continue irrespective of age.
My dad's at retirement age yet continues to work on bleeding edge harness engineering and cloud security work, yet there are plenty of 30 and 40-somethings on HN that don't know the difference between a CNI and kube-proxy let alone are bordering on unemployable due to personality and educational skill deficiencies.
And my granddad's still physically active as a farmer in the old country. And his parents were alive and active into their 90s (also as farmers).
Your grandparents were not running the goverment making decisions on topics they have no real understanding over. They only thing they might understand is all of the people asking them to do things while dropping of burlap sacks with dollar symbols printed on them. No disrespect to your family, but please, let's not compare farming to being an elected official.
The term "Senate" comes from the Latin word "senex" meaning "old man", and obviously the US inherited the term "Senate" from ancient Rome. This is a basic structure of society.
The issue is that this particular group of people older than 65 at this particular time in world history (which you happen to be living in) are Boomers who are probably the most child-like, foolish, and ignorant generation of people in world history, due to the circumstances of their upbringing (post-WW2, high technology, opulence, drug use, sexual revolution, peace in the developed world).
This isn't ageism, since normally old people do tend to have more wisdom and knowledge than young people.
There is something that really went wrong with the Boomer generation. The goal of every society is basically to survive their Boomer generation which many are not really seeming to manage.
Notice that Senate wasn't the only governing party in ancient Rome. Also "old" is relative. It meant "too old to serve in military", with Sulla's reforms the minimum age was 31 and even before that most influential senators were 40-50.
For emperors: out of 80 only 14 were over 65. 2 resigned/died at 66, 1 at 67, 2 ruled only few months, so really 9 out of 80. Rome is not the place to look for old rulers
Right you have to distinguish between the executive and legislative/judicial.
The executive being young and legislative/judicial being old was pretty typical across the ancient world.
Also people tended to not live as long in old age as they do now, we have lots of advanced medical interventions we can do to keep our old people alive and accumulating power and wealth.
Also Rome had a much healthier triangle-shaped demographic/population pyramid so they had more youngish people to draw on for elite qualities. They also had an active military culture so young people could actually prove themselves in leadership positions and make a name for themself. In the developed world in the current period that is not the case.
In general, insightful social commentary have this sort of quality i.e. "I'm with you on this but where you've taken this idea seems out there", like by definition, but it does require a level of humility.
I'm not necessarily declaring what I'm saying to be insightful but what you're describing is what a typical reaction to insightful social commentary looks like.
Yes. But. Just like long-enduring CEOs of increasing disrupt-able enterprises, long-lived politicians accumulate obligations to their donors in a manner that limits their policy latitude.
Sadly, such long-tenured politicians also happen to be old. The old-ness is mostly not actually the problem. It is the constraints.
There's a reason why every American worker is paying 6% of their income to give checks to the richest cohort in society, and every politician is afraid to touch the program.
Can you expand on what you mean? I may be ignorant but my understanding of the system is you would technically get more back percentage wise as a low wage worker? Of course this is not just some cost benefit analysis, that money means more if you make less while you are still paying in. This is not a comment on the system at large, just more specifically I want to understand what you are implying.
In the Australian system, your employer has to pay 12% of your pay into a pension ("superannuation") fund of your choice. Taxpayers still pay for pensions for those whose individual pension accounts have run out – but, in coming decades, that taxpayer expenditure is projected to shrink. [0]
Maybe the US should look at copying it? Well, Trump has expressed interest in doing so. [1] But, Australia has had something like this since the 1990s, so even if the US adopted the Australian model tomorrow, it would take a few decades for it to really make an impact.
We have plenty of great savings and retirement options in America. The problem is the word "option". Many people do not take any option but they still get old.
Social security is fine, whatever, no one likes living off it so industrious people will work hard and save on top of it. I am more annoyed when people say America has no social safety net when it spends absolute gobsmacking amounts on social security, Medicare and Medicaid.
It's such a shame they were never able to invest the SS fund in something productive. The WSJ had an article a few weeks ago that put the lost earnings close to $1 trillion.
> That, and people who are old enough to collect social security are rich.
You claim that as a fact. Seriously? I can’t tell if you’re joking, obviously there are many poor old people.
What they do that young people tend not to do is vote. Young people go on social media and tell you to burn down a Wal-mart instead of voting in a rigged system… then they don’t burn down a Wal-mart and they don’t vote.
I am explaining GP's point. He said the cohort is rich. It is true. There is more total wealth in older generations. I do claim it as fact.
It is also true that oldsters vote more. We can speculate on why that is. I say it's because they don't have jobs or anything else to do besides bingo night.
It’s not a question, it’s an incredulous reaction to someone playing word games to fake having a point. “More boomers are wealthy than other groups” doesn’t imply that there isn’t a full distribution of net worths in the elderly, including in debt and penniless.
I wanted to follow the rules and try to be charitable, but you’re making it impossible to conclude that you’re worth talking to.
Baby Boomers are on average the richest generation, with ~$1.8 million [1]. Most of them could happily fund their own lifestlye without taking money from the poor. It's not like elderly people aren't able to apply for normal government programs if they need support. Elderly people can get on SNAP so they don't starve, but why can't a 20 y/o who can't make ends meet get free checks every month?
Every young person in America is paying 6% (3% directly, 3% by their employer) of every pay check into a wealth redistribution program. Who receives the money from that program? Baby Boomers, who have an average wealth of $1.8 million, only ~$400k of which is in that house they don't feel pressure to down-size out of. The remaining ~$1.4 million is spread across a number of liquid-able assets that they could use to fund their lifestyle if they choose to [1].
It's funny that most politicians promise taxes on the wealthy to support social programs without mentioning that the overwhelming majoring of said programs involve forcing young people who don't own homes and aren't having families to give UBI to millionaires.
All the cries of ageism but there have been countless leaked reports of US Senators being treated for dementia and clearly cognitively impaired senators still serving. They're doing a weekend at bernies with McConnell right now!
Absolutely there are sharp people >65, but there is no question that cognitive decline starts in middle age and the risk for dementia increases dramatically past 65.
Then there is the argument, which imo is even stronger, of an inverting demographic pyramid and inter generational economic warfare to preserve pensions for people who won't live to see the effects of their policies. This is not at all sustainable and creates misery for the working class who will soon lack sufficient democratic power to vote their way out of it.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what's for dinner, etc..
>Absolutely there are sharp people >65, but there is no question that cognitive decline starts in middle age and the risk for dementia increases dramatically past 65.
I understand what they are defending, but it is still weird to have most of the USA presidents being born before the 50s. They don't have skin in the game. They will be dead before they see the consequences of their policies
> They will be dead before they see the consequences of their policies
Don't worry, they used their time to make sure their kids are filthy rich. Yours though...
Not even that, IMO. In the past when the world was stable for centuries, it made sense to have seniors with a long experience to drive the public, see Roman senators as an example.
Nowadays the world changes so fast it does not make sense anymore.
My grandfather was born when radio was a luxury and died after living through another revolution, the TV. Internet was not so widespread. While after him I witnessed the rise of TV, the birth of Internet and whatever other media it spawned. It's like living through 4x the advancements of our previous generation.
We can't expect a 70-80 years old to understand the world of today.
Ten in ten children have parents who are older than them
Is it so strange to wish to be governed by peers? You don't think a gerontocracy is optimal, do you?
The reason our leaders suck is not because they're old, but because democracy selects mostly for charisma, showmanship, and if we're even more cynical - a lack of morals/ethics. Political careers are most expedited by telling people what they want to hear, and by selling yourself out to the highest bidder so you can get funded by corporations and other moneyed interests. A great conman would likely make a great democratic politician. A typical definition of leadership is the four Cs - character, competence, commitment, and courage. The democratic political system doesn't select for that, at all. We want e.g. generals who rose on merit, instead we get lawyers.
As for age itself, there's also a pretty straight forward reason that we tend to pick older leaders. As people age they're generally going to find their younger selves less than desirable - naivete, gullibility, ignorance, and just generally a lack of wisdom. So I'd be terrified of having a leader in e.g. their 30s simply because I don't think they'd have anywhere near the life experience to have accumulated a reasonable base of wisdom. And I suspect as I continue to age, that 30 is going to get pushed higher and higher. Even back in Ancient Rome one could not run for Consul until you were at least 42 years old. And people likely 'grew up' much, much, faster in those times than we do now a days, simply because life was so much more testing.
You are terrified because somewhere deep down, what you want is someone who will act on worldviews similar to your own, and age is a fairly substantial component of that.
Ultimately, perhaps there is a trend, but my observations simply do not match the premise of people monotonically accumulating wisdom as they age, and in fact there are certain types of gullibility that seem to increase with age, such as the willingness to disregard and disparage scientific or objective fact in favor of personal beliefs, and to prioritize social status over signals of expertise/intelligence when judging authority. And don't forget that 80%+ of successful scams are against older people.
I think there are almost definitely tradeoffs between cognitive flexibility versus cumulative lifetime experiences, and we shouldn't discount the former - just look at how utterly dysregulated tech industries are because of out-of-touch representatives who listen to elites over experts in the field.
Age will change your perspective on politics. In general I think humanity's future looks extremely promising. We're on the verge of the automation of all 'basic' cognitive work, finally 'really' unlocking the space frontier, flirting with advanced robotics with unimaginable potential (especially paired with the first advancement) and much more.
But none of these things are going to be brought to us because of politics or politicians. They're being brought to us through technological and economic advancement. And I think the only risk we have along the way is ourselves. So at this point I couldn't care less what a politician's values are - I simply want somebody who won't get us into WW3 or bring us to the verge of it. So if you assume I'm looking for worldview alignment, my 'worldview' would come down to 'please don't screw up so badly that you cause the extinction of humanity.'
I read that book. William Golding, right?
I don't think it matters one way or the other how old leaders are. If they are capable, put them in charge. If not, don't.
Are they capable then?
In a democracy, there are capable if people voted for them.
[dead]
“It all makes sense if you think of politicians like your mom and dad” lol
Parent's typically aren't in charge of understanding and regulating technology they barely understand, let alone can operate. We need to strip the gerontocracy of their ability to enrich themselves while being incapable of understanding the world around them. The founding fathers were in their 30s.
As a parent a large part of my responsibility is making decisions and regulation about how they are allowed to interact with trends and technology I barely understand.
If you're a parent in 2026 you aren't dealing with the financial issues that are impacting other people who can't be parents because they can't make money, please kindly fuck right off, you're opinion doesn't matter. And you and your kids will be purged.
This is actually a criticism of democracy, not gerontocracy. The masses, who don't understand X, vote for people to regulate X.
Even under regimes run by young people their advisors are old people.
>The founding fathers were in their 30s.
The average age of the Constitutional Convention was 42 years old. Life expectancy of an adult[1] at that time was only about 48 years old, and the the median age of all American adults 18+ was about 30 (today it is 48).
[1]Avg life expectancy of someone from birth during this time was 37 years old.
> Life expectancy of an adult[1] at that time was only about 48 years old
Where did you see that? I found this article https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2885717/#:~:text=20... which says that in 1790, a 20 year old American white male could expect to live to his early 60s. Interestingly, life expectancy in the US actually went down during the 19th century due to urbanization. One thing you have to watch out when you're looking at numbers like this is that they catalog remaining life expectancy. For example, the chart says "41.4" but you have to add 20 to get the total life expectancy since it's remaining lifespan at age 20.
Yes, in general people place a lot of value in the wisdom that comes with age so long as the person isn’t senile.
Obviously with autocrats this isn’t applicable but there’s nothing inherently nonsensical or inexplicable about why mostly old dudes rule much of the world.
>Yes, in general people place a lot of value in the wisdom
I don't think that holds as an explanation given that 1. there's not a lot of wisdom going around among the geriatric leaders of the world, 2. this is a pretty rapidly increasing trend, not some fact of history.
Historical leaders used to be younger, including after accounting for increased lifespans. Just look at the founding of the American Republic. It's much more a sign of two things. Increased decadence and civilizations that are themselves at the end of their rope, and in democracies in particular a geriatric population that keeps voting itself into power based on their own interests.
I haven’t done the math but I’m assuming if you look at the founding fathers and life expectancy for the general population in the 18th century they would have represented what people in their 60s represent today relative to the rest of the population.
Also you can’t really talk about a geriatric population ‘voting itself into power’ if it makes up such a small proportion of the population. Young people just abstain from voting in western democracies, which is a choice just as much as voting one way or the other is. Yes, a person votes in his own self interest - that’s how that works.
>Yes, a person votes in his own self interest - that’s how that works
No, that's not how that works, some Rousseau might be in order. What early Republicans still recognized is the concept of General Will. That a polity is not just the sum of its individual interests but requires an orientation of each member towards the shared common good. A democracy that is governed by self interest, in which simply put each vote is bought is a democracy in decayed state.
That this doesn't even register with people any more and is perceived as the norm is exactly what I'm talking about when I'm saying that most current democratic nations are at the end of their life. If young people are a demographic minority and each person votes only in their selfish interest the future of the nation is, by definition, dead.That they opt out in that situation is actually rational.
They were pretty much what we’d now call fraternity brothers recently out of William and Mary plus whomever else they could rope in.
You’re not really supposed to just vote in your self-interest. It’s a proxy for violence.
'Dudes' is more of a historical artifact than an implicit requirement. But I'll allow dudes in the general form of 'enlightened persons'.
Numbers, but I couldn't find insights in the article. Is there anything worthy of take-away?
The world sucks becuase of old people and based on Hannah Ritchie's substack publications that the UK should cut pensions and its social safety net.
Which is ironic because I am younger than most HNers and Substackers who espouse this opinion and find it to be a weird form of ageism.
To me, a 45 year old and a 65 year old are equally out of touch or "old", so it feels like a pot calling a kettle black.
It's one thing to be older. It's another thing to be rational and of sound mind as an older person. At some point, it's time for grandpa to retire.
At some point absolutely, but if someone is capable of executing there's no reason for them not to continue irrespective of age.
My dad's at retirement age yet continues to work on bleeding edge harness engineering and cloud security work, yet there are plenty of 30 and 40-somethings on HN that don't know the difference between a CNI and kube-proxy let alone are bordering on unemployable due to personality and educational skill deficiencies.
And my granddad's still physically active as a farmer in the old country. And his parents were alive and active into their 90s (also as farmers).
Your grandparents were not running the goverment making decisions on topics they have no real understanding over. They only thing they might understand is all of the people asking them to do things while dropping of burlap sacks with dollar symbols printed on them. No disrespect to your family, but please, let's not compare farming to being an elected official.
I also used to be a staffer, and hold my opinion for similar reasons.
Sounds like you don't know the right old people.
Read context clues, and then read them again.
I am missing any clues about your definition of out-of-touch.
The term "Senate" comes from the Latin word "senex" meaning "old man", and obviously the US inherited the term "Senate" from ancient Rome. This is a basic structure of society.
The issue is that this particular group of people older than 65 at this particular time in world history (which you happen to be living in) are Boomers who are probably the most child-like, foolish, and ignorant generation of people in world history, due to the circumstances of their upbringing (post-WW2, high technology, opulence, drug use, sexual revolution, peace in the developed world).
This isn't ageism, since normally old people do tend to have more wisdom and knowledge than young people.
There is something that really went wrong with the Boomer generation. The goal of every society is basically to survive their Boomer generation which many are not really seeming to manage.
Notice that Senate wasn't the only governing party in ancient Rome. Also "old" is relative. It meant "too old to serve in military", with Sulla's reforms the minimum age was 31 and even before that most influential senators were 40-50.
For emperors: out of 80 only 14 were over 65. 2 resigned/died at 66, 1 at 67, 2 ruled only few months, so really 9 out of 80. Rome is not the place to look for old rulers
Right you have to distinguish between the executive and legislative/judicial.
The executive being young and legislative/judicial being old was pretty typical across the ancient world.
Also people tended to not live as long in old age as they do now, we have lots of advanced medical interventions we can do to keep our old people alive and accumulating power and wealth.
Also Rome had a much healthier triangle-shaped demographic/population pyramid so they had more youngish people to draw on for elite qualities. They also had an active military culture so young people could actually prove themselves in leadership positions and make a name for themself. In the developed world in the current period that is not the case.
> ...Boomers who are probably the most child-like, foolish, and ignorant generation of people in world history...
So are they the worst ever, or, like, just probably? If you are going to say something, don't weasel.
First paragraph, interesting.
The rest, off the rails.
2/5 stars.
In general, insightful social commentary have this sort of quality i.e. "I'm with you on this but where you've taken this idea seems out there", like by definition, but it does require a level of humility.
I'm not necessarily declaring what I'm saying to be insightful but what you're describing is what a typical reaction to insightful social commentary looks like.
Ageism.
Yes. But. Just like long-enduring CEOs of increasing disrupt-able enterprises, long-lived politicians accumulate obligations to their donors in a manner that limits their policy latitude.
Sadly, such long-tenured politicians also happen to be old. The old-ness is mostly not actually the problem. It is the constraints.
There's a reason why every American worker is paying 6% of their income to give checks to the richest cohort in society, and every politician is afraid to touch the program.
Can you expand on what you mean? I may be ignorant but my understanding of the system is you would technically get more back percentage wise as a low wage worker? Of course this is not just some cost benefit analysis, that money means more if you make less while you are still paying in. This is not a comment on the system at large, just more specifically I want to understand what you are implying.
The dollars you pay into social security today go to a recipient tomorrow. They are not invested in some pension fund.
That, and people who are old enough to collect social security are rich.
Combine those two facts.
In the Australian system, your employer has to pay 12% of your pay into a pension ("superannuation") fund of your choice. Taxpayers still pay for pensions for those whose individual pension accounts have run out – but, in coming decades, that taxpayer expenditure is projected to shrink. [0]
Maybe the US should look at copying it? Well, Trump has expressed interest in doing so. [1] But, Australia has had something like this since the 1990s, so even if the US adopted the Australian model tomorrow, it would take a few decades for it to really make an impact.
[0] https://www.thesenior.com.au/story/9346972/age-pension-spend...
[1] https://www.ncpers.org/blog/what-trumps-interest-in-australi...
The hiccup has _always_ been figuring out how to pay for existing retirees. That's why it's PAYG instead of a savings plan.
But more fundamentally, SS is more of an age pension[1]. Super is the step above that, akin to forcing all americans to fund their 401k / IRA.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_security_in_Australia#A...
We have plenty of great savings and retirement options in America. The problem is the word "option". Many people do not take any option but they still get old.
Social security is fine, whatever, no one likes living off it so industrious people will work hard and save on top of it. I am more annoyed when people say America has no social safety net when it spends absolute gobsmacking amounts on social security, Medicare and Medicaid.
be very interesting to see if Post Trump, something like Australia's Superannuation gets proposed.
It's such a shame they were never able to invest the SS fund in something productive. The WSJ had an article a few weeks ago that put the lost earnings close to $1 trillion.
> That, and people who are old enough to collect social security are rich.
You claim that as a fact. Seriously? I can’t tell if you’re joking, obviously there are many poor old people.
What they do that young people tend not to do is vote. Young people go on social media and tell you to burn down a Wal-mart instead of voting in a rigged system… then they don’t burn down a Wal-mart and they don’t vote.
See I can talk in unfounded generalities too.
I am explaining GP's point. He said the cohort is rich. It is true. There is more total wealth in older generations. I do claim it as fact.
It is also true that oldsters vote more. We can speculate on why that is. I say it's because they don't have jobs or anything else to do besides bingo night.
Next question.
> I am explaining GP's point. He said the cohort is rich. It is true. There is more total wealth in older generations. I do claim it as fact.
"The flaw of averages" strikes again!
It’s not a question, it’s an incredulous reaction to someone playing word games to fake having a point. “More boomers are wealthy than other groups” doesn’t imply that there isn’t a full distribution of net worths in the elderly, including in debt and penniless.
I wanted to follow the rules and try to be charitable, but you’re making it impossible to conclude that you’re worth talking to.
Baby Boomers are on average the richest generation, with ~$1.8 million [1]. Most of them could happily fund their own lifestlye without taking money from the poor. It's not like elderly people aren't able to apply for normal government programs if they need support. Elderly people can get on SNAP so they don't starve, but why can't a 20 y/o who can't make ends meet get free checks every month?
[1]: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-has-wealth-distribution-in...
Do you understand the difference between what you’re saying now and what was claimed before? Or do you really not understand what an average is?
Every young person in America is paying 6% (3% directly, 3% by their employer) of every pay check into a wealth redistribution program. Who receives the money from that program? Baby Boomers, who have an average wealth of $1.8 million, only ~$400k of which is in that house they don't feel pressure to down-size out of. The remaining ~$1.4 million is spread across a number of liquid-able assets that they could use to fund their lifestyle if they choose to [1].
It's funny that most politicians promise taxes on the wealthy to support social programs without mentioning that the overwhelming majoring of said programs involve forcing young people who don't own homes and aren't having families to give UBI to millionaires.
[1]: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-has-wealth-distribution-in...
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In 2026 scare quotes around the word "leader" should be obligatory in all cases.
1 in 2 Americans are over 39. 1 in 1 Americans have a governor over 39.
Well, one in twenty people is a doctor and nine in ten go see one if they have a stomach ulcer.
9 out of 10 doctors say that smoking a Lucky is good for you. of course 87% of statistics are made up