Instead, they want to make the proles work longer before they can retire. More folks will drop dead before collecting a dime. Profit!
To be fair, what Fink actually said was that Americans need to save more. Things like 401ks should be available to everyone and the limits on IRAs raised as well.
From the article’s example vignettes it’s obvious the underlying problem is the number of people who spend every penny they take in. Access to a 401k does nothing if you have no spare money to add to it.
Which of course leads back to the discussions about growing wage inequality, wages vs prices, UBI, and the fact that a lot of people who probably could save, choose not to. Our own @Broomstick being an example of a person who has modest income but still manages to live below it and thereby save.
I recall a 50-something guy I met when I was 28-ish and just out of USAF. He was a low-level non-owner manager in a small business; no tycoon. He said
Your paycheck comes in three parts, roughly equal thirds. The first part is for the IRS and SS taxes. The second part is to save. The third part is for living on.
The last of these is the only thing we each can control.
Systemic fixes would be great, and as a progressive myself I’m all for them. A significant improvement in those systemic parameters might well improve the lives of everyone under 35 right now and revolutionize the future lives of the current teens.
But any conceivable systemic changes are far too little and far too late for the age 50+ folks with almost no savings today. IMO that boat has sailed right into the shallows and is about to hit bottom (or ref current events, hit a very large bridge) and no force can stop the crash.
This needs to be written in bronze on a plaque on the base of a granite statue in DC.
And not raising the maximum benefit.
Okay, I’m not sure I’m following this. Are you talking about the maximum benefit that you get by delaying the start of your Social Security payments from full retirement age (66 or 67 now?) until you are 70? Because I feel fairly certain that SSA or whoever is responsible for it, has calculated the amount of that delayed-onset maximum, using actuarial tables, to favor the SS fund by a small amount while incentivizing people to delay starting their Social Security payments. In other words, so that it’s a net positive for the amount in the SS fund.
I trust you’re not proposing removing cost of living increases.
Not exactly. Right now there’s a maximum benefit that can be earned, regardless of how much you earned (and contributed) during your working years. From the SS website:
If you retire at age 70 in 2024, your maximum benefit would be $4,873.
This is the number that I’m talking about. Most people won’t be eligible for this amount, even if they wait until age 70 to draw their SS. But if we keep this benefit at this level, save for COLA, then it will obviously help the bottom line of the SS pot.
Is it typically raised for non-COLA reasons? This is news to me.
Nope, you’re confused about the situation. Which is understandable, the whole mess is hard and the folks upthread just dropped a couple of (correct) tidbits but without the full context… Try this …
Your basic starting benefit if you retire at the normal age for your cohort is based on how much money you paid in over your lifetime as adjusted for inflation each year. COLAs apply to subsequent years after you’ve retired, but they’re applied to your personal starting benefit number. Likewise the benefit cut for drawing bennies at 62 or the benefit raise for waiting to 70. In each case the cut/raise is based of your own personal baseline benefit amount. Which depends only on how much SS tax you’ve paid in over all those years.
Each year there is a maximum wage on which you pay SS taxes. For 2024 that’s $168,600 and this number changes for inflation every year. IIRC it was about $20K when I was in college mumble years ago. Everybody pays 12.4% of their earnings into SS, between the part the employer pays unseen by you and the part deducted from your pay. So somebody who makes 168,600/year in 2024 pays the largest possible amount in. Somebody who makes twice that, ~350K/yr, still pays the exact same amount as the guy getting by on just 168.6/yr.
Now when it’s time to draw benefits, what you get back depends on what you paid in. The formula is pretty progressive. If somebody was a high wage earner their entire career, breaking that max every single year, and retired right on time, then they’d receive the full $4,873/month that @Railer13 cited. That number is their personal baseline benefit and nobody else has a higher one.
But here’s the punchline. Whether that person earned just barely the SS max every year, or 5 or 20 or 200 times that much, they paid in the exact same amount of SS tax: 12.4% of that years’ max. And will receive the exact same benefit too: $4873/mo if retiring this year.
The proposal people are trying to explain here in the thread is to greatly increase, or remove entirely, the cap on how much wages are taxed. But without removing the cap on how much benefits are paid. So the e.g. 350K person would find themselves paying twice as much SS tax while earning exactly zero additional benefits to be paid later. Which means all the extra tax revenue from that guy would be available to shore up the Trust Fund and/or pay current benefits to lower earners.
That idea is … controversial … among that crowd.
It’s also the moral cutpoint where SS changes from “you pay in = you get (some) out” to “you pay in = you get exactly bupkiss out.” Which is probably a redline in our every man for himself society. Morally, that’s when SS changes from a social program to a welfare program.
Great explanation, Mr. LSLGuy!
Yes, of course. For me the second part went without saying (otherwise what good would the first part do towards shoring up the fund?). So I got confused by the mention of it. Anyway, thanks for clarifying.
So…the way to NOT alienate people from capitalism is to raise the retirement age? Sheer genius.
A lot of what makes that possible is that I am single with no dependents. My income would not be adequate at all if I had even 1 other, non-working person in the household. At best we’d be living paycheck to paycheck, I don’t think I could save if I was in that situation.
Which is part of the problem - adults of reproductive age, which are also the usual working years, usually DO have a dependent (or several). Sure, some would choose not to save even if they could, but there are also many who can’t save even if they want to because there’s more month than money.
That’s real key.
We have somehow worked the low-end wages down to where one person can be hand-to-mouth with a smidgen of slack if living in a low cost area. Add a higher cost area, or another mouth to feed, or the inability to work full time for reasons, and now that one wage is insufficient, period. Much less being able to save.
And if they can’t survive (much less save) on the wages society dictates, that’s somehow their fault. Probably “lack of moral fibre” as the RAF put it during WWII.
“I pulled myself up by my bootstraps pay no attention to the head start my parents gave me or the considerable government infrastructure behind the curtain, they should be able to do the same.”
Let’s not light a beacon to attract a certain poster who’s insisted it’s the height of irresponsibility to have a child unless you can guarantee to afford him/her/them until age 18+ no matter what happens to your job or income. (The fact that would mean only the independently wealthy “should” have kids is sheer coincidence. 
)
But who will we get to work in the salt mines when those kinds of kids are the only workers to be had?
Logic. It’s harder than it looks for some people.
It’s so sad that these shootings keep happening. Damn it sucks that active shooters can show up anywhere.
Shootings like that suck in general, but there are practically zero details in that story, so I’m not sure who is “evil” there. Unless the guns themselves are evil…?
Domestic dispute between the male victim and the shooter’s son. The male victim was an attorney/the female victim his girlfriend.
Here’s a decent contender: