Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

Unless you are having state pensions and taking money from taxable population and giving it to pensioners. This group keeps getting bigger thanks to constantly improving medical care, while taxable population is getting smaller thanks to declining birthrates.

Cutting pensions would probably cause massive riots, so raising retirement age is only logical way forward to keep this social pyramid scheme alive a little bit longer.

Governments and career politicians do not care and will do anything to try to make the situation worse.

For the last 10-odd years I've been putting money away / aside, making regular small contributions to investments for retirement, such that I think I'm somewhat ahead of my age cohort.

And yet, the more I look at it, the more I get the feeling that I might still have to get lucky to be able to retire at retirement age.

I would look at the real value of the dollar before assuming the real value of it went up. With how bad [actual] inflation is/will be, it wouldn’t be surprising if your pension actually dropped in real value.

Pension? Job? What’s that like? /s

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If pensions depend exclusively on what each person has contributed during their working years, then lowering the retirement age might theoretically help young people by opening up more senior positions for them.

However, in many developed countries today’s pensions are mainly paid for by today’s workers, often through a combination of social contributions and taxes.

In Spain, for example, the social security has a large structural deficit that gets covered by large taxes on salaries, taking money from other social services, and sovereign debt.

In other words, young workers are forced to support retirees through means that make it much harder for them to build a future of their own.

This system is kept in place because pensioners are a huge 1-issue voting block that no political party wants to antagonise. I believe that this is somehow downstream of cultural changes that have made all of society more individualistic and self-centred, incapable to work together for a common future.

>Does that sound correct to you?

Yes? I'm not sure if I'm missing something you think is obvious. Lowering the retirement age will open up high seniority jobs that younger people can now promote into. You can see this in congress - despite millenials being in the 40s now they are rarely seen in high level political positions due to boomers and older sticking to their jobs.

Why do you want the debt paid off?

The debt has been growing for 50 years, has life gotten worse during those 50 years?

What happens if we don't pay off the debt?

The retirement age has already been pushed back about as far as it can be, barring major advancements in medicine. Maybe some of us will still be fully capable of doing software work at age 67 but those who have spent their lives doing manual labor have usually accumulated some significant disabilities by that age. They need a break.

I think they reverse mortgaged it.

The debt has ballooned because massive tax cuts have been given to the already ultra-wealthy.

In the most recent bill, the rules for writing off private jets changed such that you can take the entire write-off in one year instead of over the life of the plane. This alone is set to cost hundreds of billions of dollars [1].

Of the ~433T in debt over the entire life of the US, ~$8T of that came from Trump's first term [2].

Some people physically break their bodies and risk their lives doing necessary but relatively low-paid work. But telling baggage handlers, construction workers, agricultural workers, firemen, commeercial fishermen and agricultural workers that they need to work to 70 instead of 65 so the debt doesn't balloon while allowing Jeff Bezos a much bigger tax break in buying his 3rd private jet is utterly bananas.

[1]: https://inequality.org/article/the-big-beautiful-bill-would-...

[2]: https://www.crfb.org/blogs/how-much-did-president-trump-add-...

Retirement is not an age, it's a financial position. Both my parents and grandparents were able to retire before qualifying for social security payments (and neither ever earned top 30 percentile incomes at any point in their lives).

Diligently save away and invest a portion of your income and you'll be alright.

To be fair, the original SS age was at the high end of the actuary tables. As science extended life, society failed to move the line of retirement.

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or a slowing of progress or a regression of the current lifestyles to which most have become accustomed.

The peeling off of some of the more recent layers that have been applied, made possible due to the abundances provided to western society by its ownership of the advanced industrialisation and information ages.

> There is no reason why the wealthiest countries on earth can't afford to let people who are 60 years old retire.

There is, though.

The 60+ year-olds wanting to retire spent the last four-to-six decades racking up a metric crapload of public and private debt. Not only did they spend a lot, they seriously weakened the ability for revenues to cover said debts. Severe bureaucratic handicapping of revenue agencies, means that an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars in tax go uncollected every year in the United States alone [1]. Imagine what the federal deficit looks like if the US had to borrow a few hundred billion less each year. It's far from zero, but it's better than it looks now.

Retirement isn't a right, it's a math problem. For most of human history, if you lived long enough to get too old to do labor, you were expected to do something (usually helping with childrearing or teaching skills to younger generations) in order to lessen the burden of your existence to others, mainly your family. Now that most labor isn't actually physical and people are living longer, there's less excuse for doing nothing for 10+ years off of savings besides just wanting to. Unfortunately, given the size of deficits in lots of Western nations and the stagnating wages of the younger generations, those retirement accounts are becoming more attractive as a way to pay off debt that the people holding those accounts created.

[1] https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-forgoes-hundr...

> how schools increase the spread of disease

I would want to think hard about the second-order effects of preventing transmission of regular school colds & flus before trying to suppress them, which would be that people would miss out on training their immune systems while they are young & resilient.

It would be nice to get sick less often and environmental suppression in schools seems like such an obvious win... but I don't have enough understanding to know if it would really be a good thing one way or the other.

The growth in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid entitlements is unsustainable.