by anonym29 | 2025-04-04 19:26:22+00:00
>To me that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of just how difficult modern financial stability is to achieve for a large proportion of the population. Living paycheque to paycheque can sometimes be neglect yes, but i'd wager that far more instances of that are due to the increasing gap between cost of living and actual wages. It's difficult to plan for retirement when you work a 60 hour week and are only just covering rent and food.

I try to take a very humble approach in evaluating what I'm entitled to. I don't believe that I'm automatically entitled to a large enough income to build long-term prosperity just because I am working 60 hours a week. At the end of the day, if I spend 60 hours digging ditches to lay fiber that is mostly used for Netflix, Youtube, and adult video content, I have delivered less value to society than if I spent 60 hours developing a new pharmaceutical drug that saved a hundred thousand lives, haven't I? It's certainly not fair, but life does not drop all of us into the adult world with an equal upbringing, an equal education, or the equal training necessary for us all to produce the same amount of value. If I want to achieve a higher income, I see that as fundamentally a "me" problem, not a problem with other people - it means I have a duty to go above and beyond, to work harder, to study longer, to research which skills have higher demand in society, to educate and train myself, and to strive for the goals that I want to achieve, because I don't believed I'm really "owed" much besides the right to life, liberty, private property, and the pursuit of happiness, which is not the same thing as a right to happiness itself, I might add. This also means I don't think I'm entitled to wage increases that match the rate of inflation. If I want to extract more value from employment, I have a duty to make myself more valuable.

I don't necessarily think everyone is capable of becoming a multi-millionaire, but I do think (almost) everyone is capable of working harder, studying more, watching less TV, buying less "wants" rather than just "needs" (recall that the most prolific purchasers of lottery tickets are the bottom two quintiles), of saving up money diligently, of being more frugal than we are, etc. Obvious exceptions apply to people with profound mental or physical disabilities, of course, but most of us are not quadriplegics or suffering from severe schizophrenia - and even those kinds of barriers haven't prevented people like Stephen Hawking or Terry Davis from going on to produce profound and noteworthy outputs. Obviously that's not the bar for people suffering from such disabilities, but I think most people are capable of much more than we give them credit for.

>It also doesn't address the fact that social security is funded by taxes, it's not a handout, people make financial decisions based on the information they have, the information they had was "pay your taxes and when it comes time to stop working you'll get some assistance". If you want to kill it, fine, stop taxing people to pay in to it, removing it after an entire lifetime of paying in to the system is basically theft.

I agree that this is a problem, and simply stripping people of benefits they spent a lifetime paying into is as fundamentally unfair as forcing them to pay into a program with no choice to opt out was. The solution needs to be compassionate, and it logically follows to me that the people calling for radical reform should be the first to offer self-sacrifice to be part of the solution. I'm a big proponent of allowing everyone to have the option to permanently opt out of receiving benefits for life from these programs, in exchange for a small tax credit or deduction to offset the FICA taxes they will continue to pay in to help fund benefits for the current or near-current retirees. I'd be the first to volunteer for such a program.