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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

The title is deceptive—"The Business Roundtable" is just doing simple math, because the fundamental issue is demographic: people are living longer and having fewer children. In the next 30 years, it simply won't be economically feasible to support a huge number of old people if all of them retire or attempt to retire at 65.

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Of course it's economically feasable. It's just a matter of priorities.

Congress managed to come up with 8 trillion dollars for the Wall St bailout at the drop of a hat, and 3 trillion (and counting) for the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. On top of that, the US manages to spend more on its military than the rest of the world combined.

To say that it couldn't come up with the money to support its own citizens in their old age would be laughable if it wasn't so sad.

You skipped the dollar number for entitlement spending. It may surprise you how much it costs to give $15k/yr to 50million people.

About $750 billion per year? What portion of that did they save previously by paying into the system? Why is it that productivity has skyrocketed since the social security system was introduced, which should account for the longer lifespans, yet we still find ourselves having these conversations?

It is a matter of priorities, plain and simple. Just because it isn't a high priority for you doesn't mean it isn't a question of priorities.

Much more than $750 billion a year, when you factor in the costs of the huge government bureaucracies that administer it and all their employees.

Maybe it's just the fact that I'm a DC native that I react this way, but what exactly are you talking about? The federal government does a fine job at a great many things with low overhead, lest you'd be getting all your mail via FedEx. I recall during the big health care debate, there was the statistic going around that the overhead of medicare was 2%, vs. somewhere around 30% for private insurance. (What those people spend on advertising alone could pay all of that "bureaucracy".)

Readers of this site should be keenly aware of these issues and what they're really about; we work in an industry with rampant age discrimination where people are encouraged to spend their early 20s working all night to make someone else rich, people routinely burn out before 30 ... do you expect to be pulling all-nighters at your Rails startup at 70? No? Then you should pay attention and get pissed off about this stuff.

They didn't "save" anything by "Paying into the system". They directly supported retirees of the past, as today's workers support them now.

Don't put priorities in my mouth.

The problem is, it isn't about money. The government has all the money it needs, the government can print money if it needs to.[1] The problem is that all these old people will need goods and services, and no amount of legerdemain with mere money can get around the fact that those goods and services must actually be produced, and the people producing those goods and services are therefore not producing other goods and services.

When you hear that statistic about two workers per retiree or whatever, don't just be thinking about money; that's the output of those two workers putatively going to support the retiree, and what's leftover going to power the economy.

As convenient as it can be to analyze problems in terms of money in normal life, when it gets to these really big "structure of society" problems the abstraction starts to get in your way again. Many of the characteristics of money are downright deceptive; one may save $100 today, but $100 of, say, corn today is not going to feed any retirees 20 years from now, it'll just be a rotted mess. Goods and services store poorly; they need to be matched up producer/consumer in something more like real time. Money is a great abstraction over that, but a still a secondary phenomenon compared to that real-time match up.

Of course, we can indeed support quite a few retirees... if one adjusts their standard of living down a long way. If it's OK for them to dial 911 and for nothing to happen, we've got more than enough wealth to support all kinds of retirees. Start specifying out a "good" first-world life style, though, and it becomes problematic again.

The problem is not, in absolute terms, a "lack of money"; the problem is that we've made promises about the quality of the retired life that are going to be very difficult to keep with small single-digit numbers of goods and service providers, while at the same time having enough of a productive economy to produce the wealth that will make it possible to keep those promises. Money is a very poor lens to analyze this problem through.

(Personally I don't believe the problem to be as hopeless as it seems, as there are still some avenues for significant per-worker productivity enhancements, mostly in terms of significant improvements in robotics. However, it must be observed that with our current set of promises, we 20-, 30-, and probably even 40-year olds are effectively all-in with our retirements on that hope, because if tech were to stagnate at current levels the current set of promises is probably mathematically infeasible.)

[1]: I'm not saying this is good or desirable, btw, it's just part of my point about this not being about money.

But tons of people are unemployed and we are not suffering any shortage of goods or services, so I don't understand how structural issues are applicable to this problem. Are you saying that if everyone magically got their social security checks regardless of government insolvency that the economy would not be able to support that additional purchasing power?

What I'm saying is, money doesn't matter if we make promises to retirees that require three workers per retiree to fulfill and only two workers per retiree physically exist. No matter how much money you throw at the problem, retirees can not draw on more resources than physically exist. And you have to leave enough left over for the rest of the economy, too; those two workers can't be 100% allocated to retirees, because they also need to eat, provide shelter for themselves, ideally provide for some sort of family so there's someone there to pay for their retirement, also pay taxes so there's still a government, etc, etc. Money can only choose from the possible set of economic allocations, not the impossible ones.

And the higher-level point is just that when it comes to this sort of big "how shall we structure society?" questions, thinking in terms of money affords bad logic. In particular, people can't resist straight-line interpolations based on current prices, as if prices don't change and we have an infinite pool of resources to draw on at unchanging prices, so it's just a matter of scaring up enough money. That works in your day-to-day life, it's not how it works at a societal scale.

With 9% unemployment and 15% of the population retired, it seems we have a good amount of labor available for servicing and goodsing retirees.

You're just rephrasing your original post, but you're not offering any evidence of why you think the burden of retirees is going to be so overwhelming. Why are retirees going to require an "impossible allocation"? Seems to me if demand increases then prices go up. Sure it starts to break down at extreme cases, but why would a marginally increased body of retired people be such an event? We do not have a shortage of workers at all, and the trend is to produce more stuff with ever fewer workers.

Your numbers are wrong. Sure, loan guarantees and lines of credit might have hit the multi-trillion dollar mark. But loans != money the government loses. The net cost of the bailouts is at most $150 billion [1]. And that number is assuming the every group that still owes the government money goes bankrupt or defaults right now. So that number is higher than the number that we'll see several years from now, because there are still loans/equity stakes outstanding that are being paid off today, with interest (or, in the case of equity stakes, are going to be sold off in the future).

Meanwhile, major entitlement spending (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, CHIP) accounts for 44% of the entire federal budget (total entitlements accounting for 62%) [2]. Total entitlements amount to $2 trillion in 2012, and increasing significantly faster than inflation every year.

[1] http://projects.propublica.org/bailout/ [2] http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/10/federal-spe...

By 2030, Medicare alone is projected to cost about 5.5% of GDP (about $1.15B/year), and by 2040 the cost will rise to 6% of GDP (1.6B/year). The numbers just get worse after that.

Do the math. It doesn't add up.

https://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/TRSUM/

If Dean Baker's analyses are correct, then concerns around demographics, retirement, and Social Security are all relatively easy to solve, and the only really big problem is health care costs.

I don't see how that makes the title deceptive? The title says that the business roundtable wants people to work until they're 70, which is true. The calculations involved here are irrelevant.

I'd like to see the results of this math.

How much is saved/earned if each worker retires at 70 instead of 65?

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