🔥 This is why I oppose making things public institutions.



  • Create a government mandated savings account as a safety net for people ensuring they prepare for retirement?

    Be ready to have millennials demand they get to have all the money you put into it, and they didn't, redirected to them.

    "Fuck you guys and all the money you set aside.... it's ours because we need it more."

    Simply because the government mismanages our money, they get to take it.

    I suppose, next they'll have claim to our 401ks because that money hasn't been taxed, and therefore subsidized by the government.


  • BINNED

    And, inevitably, the top comment ("recommended"!) is some retard bringing up universal basic income. I really don't understand where this sense of entitlement and all this whining comes from. (I mean, I do, but it's not very nice.)



  • @blek said:

    universal basic income

    If you have a bottom cap on income, why not have a top cap.

    How about we just give everyone the same amount of money no matter what they do.

    Watch as every sits on their ass.

    Oh, wait, that doesn't work, the government would fall apart due to lost GDP. So, what ends up happening? Oh, yeah, you get thrown on a train and the government decides what you do.



  • @blek said:

    some retard bringing up universal basic income.

    The Earth in Larry Niven's Known Space universe had that implemented, and it seemed pretty on-the-ball.



  • If you're not fundamentally opposed to the idea of welfare, a UBI is a pretty good way of doing it. Minimal bureaucracy, allows you to have no minimum wage and maybe improve employment, means you don't have weird threshold effects where at $x gross income earning a little more reduces your net. Expensive though, and there's still going to be problems around people with serious health issues that prevent them working much being able to afford medical care.

    @xaade said:

    Be ready to have millennials demand they get to have all the money you put into it, and they didn't, redirected to them.

    Psst... the point of that article is that for some statistics retirees are wealthier than young people; the redirect-social-security thing is the clickbait hook.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    The Earth in Larry Niven's Known Space universe had that implemented, and it seemed pretty on-the-ball.

    That was also pretty close to a post-scarcity society.



  • @jmp said:

    Psst... the point of that article is that for some statistics retirees are wealthier than young people; the redirect-social-security thing is the clickbait hook.

    Yes and no.

    Of course that was the flanderization of it, which became the title.

    But even past that, it says that millenials are poorer than retired people.

    As if retired people are supposed to be poor.

    As if a person can't choose to set aside income, because your money is more valuable the older you are, if you've been saving it.



  • They were really slacking off on the whole "fleeing from the inevitable destruction of life on Earth in 20,000 years" thing though. Those Puppeteers were a heck more on-the-ball when it came to that.



  • @xaade said:

    But even past that, it says that millenials are poorer than retired people.

    As if retired people are supposed to be poor.

    As if a person can't choose to set aside income, because your money is more valuable the older you are, if you've been saving it.

    I don't know how representative their statistics are; my experience is that this kind of article is wildly selective. But they do claim that that ordering is unprecedented. I'd certainly be surprised to discover that retirees have more disposable income as a group than people in the 20-30 age group.

    I don't think the point is "Retired people are supposed to be poor". The point is "Young people starting their careers probably shouldn't be poorer than retired people, as a class". It's part of a broad argument that baby boomers have gotten themselves large entitlements from governments and are now pulling the ladder up behind them. Is that entirely fair? Probably not, but it's at least as fair as your bitching.



  • @jmp said:

    The point is "Young people starting their careers probably shouldn't be poorer than retired people, as a class".

    Based on what.

    Your income level and assets should be higher when you retire than when you first started working.

    @jmp said:

    It's part of a broad argument that baby boomers have gotten themselves large entitlements from governments and are now pulling the ladder up behind them.

    Maybe, but these speculative progressive projections never show any indicators, they just look at numbers and suppose something is wrong because they don't like the numbers.

    I'm sure when the current millennial progressives go to retire, they'll be pissed off that new workers earn more. Of course, that will make them conservative.... imagine that.



  • @xaade said:

    Based on what.

    Your income level and assets should be higher when you retire than when you first started working.

    Assuming their stats are trustworthy, it hasn't happened before, so your 'should' is either irrelevant or false.

    I agree that someone at the end of their career is going to be earning more than someone at the start of their career, and going to have more assets. But once they've actually retired and are living off their savings or pension, it'd be surprising for them to have more disposable income than their grandkids. Might suggest that something is fucked up with the economy the grandkids are going into.

    @xaade said:

    Maybe, but these speculative progressive projections never show any indicators, they just look at numbers and suppose something is wrong because they don't like the numbers.

    I'm sure when the current millennial progressives go to retire, they'll be pissed off that new workers earn more. Of course, that will make them conservative.... imagine that.

    In what way are numbers not indicators?

    And isn't this just the argument that millennial progressives want the same thing the baby boomers got (i.e., entitlements and concessions, but for them, not for anybody else), but with the twist that you only condemn millenials for it?



  • @jmp said:

    it'd be surprising for them to have more disposable income than their grandkids. Might suggest that something is fucked up with the economy the grandkids are going into.

    No it wouldn't.

    It'd be surprising if someone living off of social security and only 401k matching had more disposable income.

    It would not be surprising if someone, who saved money correctly, had more disposable income.

    You're comparing a wide spectrum, which includes people who earned significantly more in their 40s and 50s, than people are earning in their 30s today.

    I don't think you understand how retirement, compound interest, diverse investments, and other ways of saving and building equity works.

    You do realize that if your house naturally appreciates, you can live in a house magnitudes larger than your first house? Then you can reverse mortgage that, downsize, and have a reverse mortgage going into your pocket. Once again, another layer of income after retirement.

    @jmp said:

    And isn't this just the argument that millennial progressives want the same thing the baby boomers got (i.e., entitlements and concessions, but for them, not for anybody else), but with the twist that you only condemn millenials for it?

    No, millenials want something they haven't contributed to, and they want it right now, over the people that have contributed their whole life to it, because "we have less than you".



  • @jmp said:

    In what way are numbers not indicators?

    Whenever they haven't been properly cherrypicked to support a conservative's worldview, duh.



  • @jmp said:

    In what way are numbers not indicators?

    They never show how the numbers indicate what they are saying.

    "30 year olds are poorer than retired people, this should not be"

    How does the difference in disposable income indicate some unfair situation where someone earning for their whole life has more than someone starting their career?

    So the numbers are different.... and...?

    What does it indicate other than the incomes are different?



  • @xaade said:

    No it wouldn't.

    It'd be surprising if someone living off of social security and only 401k matching had more disposable income.

    It would not be surprising if someone, who saved money correctly, had more disposable income.

    You're comparing a wide spectrum, which includes people who earned significantly more in their 40s and 50s, than people are earning in their 30s today.

    I don't think you understand how retirement, compound interest, diverse investments, and other ways of saving and building equity works.

    You do realize that if your house naturally appreciates, you can live in a house magnitudes larger than your first house? Then you can reverse mortgage that, downsize, and have a reverse mortgage going into your pocket. Once again, another layer of income after retirement.

    I guess nobody before the Boomers ever thought of having diverse investments, compound interest, property appreciating, etc..

    (Again assuming the article's statistics are representative and/or meaningful).

    @xaade said:

    No, millenials want something they haven't contributed to, and they want it right now, over the people that have contributed their whole life to it, because "we have less than you".

    So it's a different justification than the Boomers had. Same difference.



  • @jmp said:

    So it's a different justification than the Boomers had. Same difference.

    Ok, so you're talking specifically about people who joined social security towards the end of their career and therefore didn't contribute.

    I missed that, because you seemed to imply that retired people having more disposable income is somehow wrong.

    Once again, going back to my first point, making things like mandatory savings and having the government mismanage it is stupid.



  • @jmp said:

    I guess nobody before the Boomers ever thought of having diverse investments, compound interest, property appreciating, etc..

    Well, social security was a response to people having their retirement fail because of a systemic failure of the market.

    So, starting out it was always designed to be kicked back and not really invested forward.

    It's kinda like the inverse of "too big to fail". Handling the situation on the other end of the deal, retiring investors. Social security is putting all retiring people in a special class and calling that entity "too big to fail".



  • @xaade said:

    They never show how the numbers indicate what they are saying.

    "30 year olds are poorer than retired people, this should not be"

    How does the difference in disposable income indicate some unfair situation where someone earning for their whole life has more than someone starting their career?

    So the numbers are different.... and...?

    What does it indicate other than the incomes are different?

    They do argue that this is the first time this has happened as far back as the data goes (following through to the Guardian article, some of the timeframes are more like '30 years'). That would suggest it's a tad unprecedented and weird. Again, caveats, I don't know how meaningful their stats are, etc. Might just be an effect of data being sketchy prior to, say, WW2.

    The Guardian article it links to claims that several countries have had the under-30 contingent become poorer in real terms over the last x-ty years, which if true should be a fairly obvious 'something is wrong' indicator. As in, that contingent earns less money when adjusted for inflation than it did a decade ago, or two decades. You agree that people becoming poorer in real terms is a bad thing, right? Meanwhile, apparently, retirees have seen significant increases in income in real terms.

    If I had to guess, those numbers are probably partially the result of the financial crisis hitting people entering the job market really hard, and partially the result of property prices soaring in a lot of the world meaning that people who got in on the property market before it soared (i.e. mostly people who are retiring now) have a lot of assets. Worrying? Iunno, maybe. I'm not too fond of large segments of society earning less in real terms. If it's just an effect of the GFC, then whatever, it'll go away. If it's something more systemic associated with how everything is set up, then it might be a problem.

    @xaade said:

    Ok, so you're talking specifically about people who joined social security towards the end of their career and therefore didn't contribute.

    I missed that, because you seemed to imply that retired people having more disposable income is somehow wrong.

    Once again, going back to my first point, making things like mandatory savings and having the government mismanage it is stupid.

    No, that was a dig at all the welfare that was brought in when the Boomer contingent was in the right age group for them and after they left started getting cracked-down-on. For example, where I live, Boomers got free tertiary education, people just after the Boomers until roughly the present day got very favourable government-subsidized student loans, with them becoming less and less favourable as you go to the present day, and now there's rumblings about maybe charging interest instead of indexing it to inflation. Umemployment benefits have gotten stricter since they were brought in post-WW2. Our public health system has been slowly becoming less and less public in a variety of ways (most recently the government's been talking about bringing in an additional mandatory fee for seeing a GP). The incredibly favourable tax deal people get on superannuation is probably going to be the next casualty in a decade or two, after most of the Boomer contingent has died or used it to maximum advantage.



  • @jmp said:

    which if true should be a fairly obvious 'something is wrong' indicator

    But why is it wrong?

    Are people choosing bad careers? Is a shift from self-employment to employment a problem? Is corporate size a problem?

    These are all reasons I have a feeling contribute more than who is earning what.

    @jmp said:

    I'm not too fond of large segments of society earning less in real terms.

    See, I generally... don't care.

    If there is a real systematic reason, then yes. But I don't care about systemic differences.

    I'm more worried about what I can do for myself to make my own better. I could care less if somebody retiring has more than me, as they should.

    I would want to live in a world where I have more disposable income as I age, not less.

    @jmp said:

    with how everything is set up

    That would be systematic. There is a difference between the two. At that point, I'd agree with you. If there are systematic influences, like politicians getting campaign contributions from companies that they award grants to, then there is a problem.

    @jmp said:

    Boomers got free tertiary education

    That's a problem.

    @jmp said:

    people just after the Boomers until roughly the present day got very favourable government-subsidized student loans, with them becoming less and less favourable as you go to the present day

    That could be based on the market.

    @jmp said:

    and now there's rumblings about maybe charging interest instead of indexing it to inflation

    That's an actual problem.

    @jmp said:

    Umemployment benefits have gotten stricter since they were brought in post-WW2.

    Probably because the work market is more global.


    And that's my point.

    You can't necessarily blame the Boomers for all these problems.

    For education, you have to understand that maybe offering student loans at all has increased the cost well past inflation. There are market forces that are also to blame, and so you have to be willing to sit down and differentiate between market forces and systematic forces.

    The reason this is important? If you try to balance against a market force with a systematic force, you create problems like the ones you are complaining about.

    Systematic forces are stickier than market forces. Therefore, they usually outlast their usefulness, long after the market force has shifted. Then the systematic forces become problematic.



  • @jmp said:

    If I had to guess, those numbers are probably partially the result of the financial crisis hitting people entering the job market really hard, and partially the result of property prices soaring in a lot of the world meaning that people who got in on the property market before it soared (i.e. mostly people who are retiring now) have a lot of assets.

    Or it could be the result of any economic system that relies on continual growth in order to remain functional amounting to a Ponzi scheme, and failing in exactly the same way as any other Ponzi scheme when the number of new investors starts to fall away - which is exactly what has to happen at the tail end of any baby boom.



  • @xaade said:

    But why is it wrong?

    Are people choosing bad careers? Is a shift from self-employment to employment a problem? Is corporate size a problem?

    These are all reasons I have a feeling contribute more than who is earning what.

    If someone told you that the murder rate was increasing, would you say "But why is that a problem?"

    This isn't a relative thing, if that's what you've misunderstood. It's a segment of the population experiencing negative wage growth (well not really because it's not necessarily the same people in that bracket, but you know what I mean). You agree that recessions are bad right?

    I can't really give a reason for why that's bad without dropping down to ethical frameworks, and I'm not sure what you run. Probably some weird virtue ethics thing, at a guess.

    @xaade said:

    I would want to live in a world where I have more disposable income as I age, not less.

    You want to live in a world where an ordinary worker's investments + any pension out-earn what they had when they were actually working, at all points in their working life? How do you think that could possibly function? I'm not sure you can actually get that without some asset ballooning in value ridiculously over several decades - like real estate has.

    @xaade said:

    That would be systematic. There is a difference between the two. At that point, I'd agree with you. If there are systematic influences, like politicians getting campaign contributions from companies that they award grants to, then there is a problem.

    Like, perhaps, weird demographic shifts caused by having a generation significantly larger than the generation before and after it?

    @xaade said:

    That could be based on the market.

    No, it's all government-provided. No market pressure, you basically can't get a private loan for this kind of thing over here. Rules used to be that it was indexed to the consumer price index, then it was indexed to the average of the last three years of CPI after a year where CPI went negative, used to be that you got a bonus for paying off large chunks (as in, you contribute more than $Y in one go, you get $Y * 1.1 removed from the loan), that got removed, etc. etc. Some of it's fair enough - the benefits for paying off a large chunk in one go are basically welfare for people with lots of money - the thing people are complaining about is the appearance that the Boomers benefited from all this stuff and are now setting about removing it now that they have to pay for it.

    @xaade said:

    Probably because the work market is more global.

    Also complaining about feckless youth plays well to a certain large contingent of the voting populace.

    @xaade said:

    You can't necessarily blame the Boomers for all these problems.

    For education, you have to understand that maybe offering student loans at all has increased the cost well past inflation. There are market forces that are also to blame, and so you have to be willing to sit down and differentiate between market forces and systematic forces.

    The reason this is important? If you try to balance against a market force with a systematic force, you create problems like the ones you are complaining about.

    Systematic forces are stickier than market forces. Therefore, they usually outlast their usefulness, long after the market force has shifted. Then the systematic forces become problematic.

    You're going to need to unpack 'systematic force' there, I'm afraid. A force driven by the system? Something the government does?

    The Boomers preferentially vote for the party responsible for a lot of this. It's a very diffuse kind of responsibility, but there you go.

    @flabdablet said:

    Or it could be the result of any economic system that relies on continual growth in order to remain functional amounting to a Ponzi scheme, and failing in exactly the same way as any other Ponzi scheme when the number of new investors starts to fall away - which is exactly what has to happen at the tail end of any baby boom.

    I'm not quite ready to throw away the entirety of conventional economics.



  • @jmp said:

    I'm not quite ready to throw away the entirety of conventional economics.

    Why not? What has conventional economics ever done for us?

    apart from the roads. and the schools. and public sanitation, you remember what the place used to smell like.



  • @flabdablet said:

    Why not? What has conventional economics ever done for us?

    apart from the roads. and the schools. and public sanitation, you remember what the place used to smell like.

    Well, yeah, the roads and schools and public sanitation. I don't think economists are idiots, too, and they've clearly got something right - I'm better off being alive now than at almost every other point in history.

    Things I didn't expect I would be doing: defending conventional economics.



  • @jmp said:

    Well, yeah, the roads and schools and public sanitation.

    I oppose making those things public institutions. Privatize the lot of them, I say. Give the people vouchers that empower them to choose where their shit gets processed.

    hey ladies if you like it stick a barcode on it



  • @jmp said:

    If someone told you that the murder rate was increasing, would you say "But why is that a problem?"

    That is an active thing that leads to a violation of basic rights. Not a reasonable comparison.

    @jmp said:

    It's a segment of the population experiencing negative wage growth (well not really because it's not necessarily the same people in that bracket, but you know what I mean). You agree that recessions are bad right?

    You're looking at a broad spectrum of people and seeing overall their pay going down relative to inflation. It isn't a problem to notice that. It's a problem to assume what the reason is. If you are assuming the problem is systematic when it's a market force, that's going to end up bad. There could be a multitude of reasons. In America a growing segment of the population has chosen not to increase their skills and be productive, instead of staying in unproductive low skill jobs. You could argue that there are cultural reasons. But the answer isn't to throw welfare at the problem. The answer is to reverse the trend and get them back into skilled jobs.

    @jmp said:

    You want to live in a world where an ordinary worker's investments + any pension out-earn what they had when they were actually working, at all points in their working life?

    Yes. Absolutely yes.

    @jmp said:

    How do you think that could possibly function? I'm not sure you can actually get that without some asset ballooning in value ridiculously over several decades - like real estate has.

    It doesn't have to balloon, it just has to appreciate. And then you liquidate your assets after you retire and live off of that income.

    This is what 401ks are.

    @jmp said:

    Like, perhaps, weird demographic shifts caused by having a generation significantly larger than the generation before and after it?

    That's not a systematic problem.

    No one formed an organization and said, we need to have more children.

    And if you're going to start thinking this way, then we need to create a way to kill poor children before they are born and their surplus population...

    You see, it's a terrible idea to think there is an inherent problem there.

    @jmp said:

    No, it's all government-provided. No market pressure, you basically can't get a private loan for this kind of thing over here.

    Really, the government doesn't sit down and look at their lending and base it on outside market forces, at all? There's no such thing as no market pressure. This is again progressive holy government religion thinking here.



  • @flabdablet said:

    Or it could be the result of any economic system that relies on continual growth in order to remain functional amounting to a Ponzi scheme, and failing in exactly the same way as any other Ponzi scheme when the number of new investors starts to fall away - which is exactly what has to happen at the tail end of any baby boom.

    That's where the liberals get the idea that debt isn't a problem.

    Until they realize that there aren't enough new people to pay off enough of the growing debt to ensure we maintain a high rating score.



  • @xaade said:

    That is an active thing that leads to a violation of basic rights. Not a reasonable comparison.

    I'm a utilitarian; I think worlds where people are happier are better than worlds where people aren't happier. So yeah, I think worlds where people are wealthier are better than worlds where people aren't wealthier. If you don't think that, then you don't think recessions are bad, and your only standing to want to earn more in investments than you earnt in wages at the end of your working life is personal interest. Maybe millenials have personal interest in earning more money? Huh, funny that.

    @xaade said:

    You're looking at a broad spectrum of people and seeing overall their pay going down relative to inflation. It isn't a problem to notice that. It's a problem to assume what the reason is. If you are assuming the problem is systematic when it's a market force, that's going to end up bad. There could be a multitude of reasons. In America a growing segment of the population has chosen not to increase their skills and be productive, instead of staying in unproductive low skill jobs. You could argue that there are cultural reasons. But the answer isn't to throw welfare at the problem. The answer is to reverse the trend and get them back into skilled jobs.

    Damn those feckless youth!

    (p.s. I don't believe you)

    @xaade said:

    Yes. Absolutely yes.

    @xaade said:

    It doesn't have to balloon, it just has to appreciate. And then you liquidate your assets after you retire and live off of that income.

    This is what 401ks are.

    Maybe this is a language barrier thing. Let's assume you're a hard-working professional - maybe in the computer industry! - and earn $100,000/year when you retire, putting you in the top 20% of US households.

    In order to earn $100,000/year from your assets, well you're going to need a lot of assets. $2 million dollars at 5% interest would do it, for example. Lets say you've been earning $100,000 for a long time and save half of it each year, and reinvest the 5% interest. How long would it take you to have $2 million in assets?

    ~22/23 years, according to the compound interest calculator I just looked up (initial deposit $0, compounded monthly, deposits monthly). How plausible is that, do you think? Keep in mind I haven't accounted for tax, dunno how that affects things. 5% is probably too low a return on your asset, but saving half your income is ludicrous and obviously you won't be earning that much for 20 years.

    @xaade said:

    Really, the government doesn't sit down and look at their lending and base it on outside market forces, at all? There's no such thing as no market pressure. This is again progressive holy government religion thinking here.

    Obviously there are some market forces, in that the price of a degree is going to include salaries for lecturers, the cost of materials, etc. which is determined by market forces, even if the government has a significant thumb on the price-of-degree scales (which they do), but the principle determinant of the rules under which HECS operates are what the voters will put up with. It's a government-provided loan for a place at a mostly-government-funded institution with governmental limits on how much they can charge and a government-driven quota system. Not much of a market, dude.



  • @jmp said:

    Maybe millenials have personal interest in earning more money?

    Confiscating social security at a point in their life where they haven't contributed to it, isn't "wanting to earn more money".

    :moving_goal_post:

    @jmp said:

    Damn those feckless youth!

    (p.s. I don't believe you)

    It doesn't matter if you believe me.

    You want them to earn more, a potential answer is to get them more skilled. Handing them money isn't an answer at all to "earning more".

    And besides, my point is that you have to find the underlying reason for why they aren't earning more. You can't project or speculate the reason. If you don't address that reason, then you'll just find yourself in the same boat a generation or two later. Which means, again, handing them money isn't an answer.

    @jmp said:

    In order to earn $100,000/year from your assets, well you're going to need a lot of assets. $2 million dollars at 5% interest would do it, for example. Lets say you've been earning $100,000 for a long time and save half of it each year, and reinvest the 5% interest. How long would it take you to have $2 million in assets?

    ~22/23 years, according to the compound interest calculator I just looked up (initial deposit $0, compounded monthly, deposits monthly). How plausible is that, do you think? Keep in mind I haven't accounted for tax, dunno how that affects things. 5% is probably too low a return on your asset, but saving half your income is ludicrous and obviously you won't be earning that much for 20 years.

    Not only is your hypothetical situation entirely possible. People live at the means they set for themselves. You grossly underestimate the potential for asset growth.

    5% is dismal. And social security earns less than 5%.

    @jmp said:

    It's a government-provided loan for a place at a mostly-government-funded institution with governmental limits on how much they can charge and a government-driven quota system. Not much of a market, dude.

    You mean you never compete with foreign workers, allow for foreign work visas, or even account for the opportunity cost of studying abroad or not even going to college.

    Many of the big tech crowd never finished college.

    You have a very limited understanding of market forces.



  • @xaade said:

    Confiscating social security at a point in their life where they haven't contributed to it, isn't "wanting to earn more money".

    :moving_goal_post:

    Haven't we already established that that was the clickbait hook? I'm just trying to get you to admit that negative wage growth is a bad thing and that millenials have a legitimate gripe.

    @xaade said:

    It doesn't matter if you believe me.

    You want them to earn more, a potential answer is to get them more skilled. Handing them money isn't an answer at all to "earning more".

    And besides, my point is that you have to find the underlying reason for why they aren't earning more. You can't project or speculate the reason. If you don't address that reason, then you'll just find yourself in the same boat a generation or two later. Which means, again, handing them money isn't an answer.

    No, you made an unsupported assertion and I'm calling it. As far as I'm aware the millennial age group is quite well educated.

    @xaade said:

    Not only is your hypothetical situation entirely possible. People live at the means they set for themselves. You grossly underestimate the potential for asset growth.

    5% is dismal. And social security earns less than 5%.

    US GDP growth hasn't been significantly above 5% since ~1980. If you're earning more than that on your investments, you've invested somewhere that's growing faster than the economy overall. That's certainly quite possible, but I think my point stands.

    If you think the scenario I sketched is plausible and makes your desire for retirees to earn more than they earned working look sensible, you're crazy.

    @xaade said:

    You mean you never compete with foreign workers, allow for foreign work visas, or even account for the opportunity cost of studying abroad or not even going to college.

    Many of the big tech crowd never finished college.

    You have a very limited understanding of market forces.

    I think you've got no idea what you're talking about.

    How the fuck do foreign workers or kids studying abroad (or not at all) affect how much the government charges citizens for a uni degree? Seriously, unpack that one. Explain. Because it makes no sense. The best I can get out of that is "What if demand for tertiary education drops!!!?!", but reduced demand would reduce the cost if that were a significant factor, and anyway this entire system is driven by, again, government-set price caps and a government-set quota of governmentally-supported places allowed.

    And I'm not even talking about the actual amount the loan is for, I'm talking about the rules surrounding how repayment works! Maybe you're arguing that more ex-students aren't paying back their loan because of competition from foreign workers? Studying abroad or not going to college still aren't relevant to that, though, and governments don't tend to fold if they make losses on their welfare payments.



  • @jmp said:

    Haven't we already established that that was the clickbait hook? I'm just trying to get you to admit that negative wage growth is a bad thing and that millenials have a legitimate gripe.

    They have a gripe, but until we find out why, they're just griping at the air.

    @jmp said:

    No, you made an unsupported assertion and I'm calling it. As far as I'm aware the millennial age group is quite well educated.

    Yes, the heavy stream of art majors, gender studies, and such...

    There's a ton of money to be made that applies to a diversity of interests. Unfortunately everyone's interests are being redirected to college, which is not always the best fit.

    As such, you have people who are ill-equipped, under perform, end up getting a job that doesn't use their degree, etc.

    These are all things you could also target for improving the earnings of millennials.

    @jmp said:

    If you're earning more than that on your investments, you've invested somewhere that's growing faster than the economy overall. That's certainly quite possible, but I think my point stands.

    No it doesn't. Good market mixes will earn far more than that.

    @jmp said:

    but reduced demand would reduce the cost if that were a significant factor, and anyway this entire system is driven by, again, government-set price caps and a government-set quota of governmentally-supported places allowed.

    And eventually reduce the supply as well as quality.

    The point I'm making is that you can't isolate a market just by wrapping it in government regulation. It's still connected to the surrounding market.

    You can pump as much money as you want into an art degree, and it won't earn any more.

    @jmp said:

    governments don't tend to fold if they make losses on their welfare payments.

    No, they just hyper-inflate.

    Like Detroit.

    You must believe that government money is endless...



  • @jmp said:

    US GDP growth hasn't been significantly above 5% since ~1980

    The default return is 7%, and ranges up to 12%.

    @jmp said:

    you've invested somewhere that's growing faster than the economy overall

    That's entirely the point of investing.

    If you don't want to grow faster than the economy, buy a bond.



  • @xaade said:

    You want them to earn more, a potential answer is to get them more skilled.

    Increasing the average skill level of the unemployed pool serves mainly to reduce the market rate payable for skilled work. Supply and demand, dude. You can argue with me, but you can't argue with conventional economics.



  • @xaade said:

    They have a gripe, but until we find out why, they're just griping at the air.

    So you concede there's a legitimate gripe. Good, we're getting somewhere. 😛

    @xaade said:

    Yes, the heavy stream of art majors, gender studies, and such...

    There's a ton of money to be made that applies to a diversity of interests. Unfortunately everyone's interests are being redirected to college, which is not always the best fit.

    As such, you have people who are ill-equipped, under perform, end up getting a job that doesn't use their degree, etc.

    These are all things you could also target for improving the earnings of millennials.

    This is all unsupported assertion.

    @xaade said:

    And eventually reduce the supply as well as quality.

    The point I'm making is that you can't isolate a market just by wrapping it in government regulation. It's still connected to the surrounding market.

    You can pump as much money as you want into an art degree, and it won't earn any more.

    I'm going to take the refusal to explain what you meant as an admission that you were just throwing up squid ink and don't actually have a point.

    @xaade said:

    No, they just hyper-inflate.

    Like Detroit.

    You must believe that government money is endless...

    This also makes no sense in context. For one, the Australian government has not, in fact, undergone hyperinflation. Secondly, governments can absolutely spend more than they earn for periods of time without undergoing hyperinflation, within limits (mostly, that people believe that other people believe that the government's bonds are worth something).

    @xaade said:

    http://www.interest.com/savings/calculators/401k-calculator/

    The default return is 7%, and ranges up to 12%.

    @xaade said:

    That's entirely the point of investing.

    If you don't want to grow faster than the economy, buy a bond.

    That still doesn't get you where you want to go. The numbers just aren't large enough.



  • @jmp said:

    Secondly, governments can absolutely spend more than they earn for periods of time without undergoing hyperinflation, within limits (mostly, that people believe that other people believe that the government's bonds are worth something).

    This is probably the problem then.

    I'm talking about the American government.

    We seem to have no cap on spending.

    @jmp said:

    That still doesn't get you where you want to go. The numbers just aren't large enough.

    7-12% gets you there faster than you think.

    10% of 40k gets you 3 quarters of a million, and that's with low numbers.



  • @jmp said:

    If you're earning more than that on your investments, you've invested somewhere that's growing faster than the economy overall.

    Conservative economic logic goes like this:

    I am doing well. Those people complaining about not doing well are not doing the same things as I am. Therefore, all that needs to happen is for those feckless pricks to man up and do what I am doing. Then everything will be just fine! In a land of opportunity, everybody gets what they deserve! Personal Responsibility! Also Free Speech!

    The free market is entirely non-coercive by definition, making it the only sound moral basis for an economic system; therefore, no economics based on free market principles could possibly yield persistent structural economic disadvantage. We see persistent structural disadvantage. Therefore, the free market is being tampered with and distorted by Dangerous Progressives! Leave the Free Market alone! Good Old Fashioned American Gumption will solve all! Personal Responsibility! Also Free Speech! Probably.

    What's that you say? You can't find work that pays a decent wage? Well you're clearly just not... er... HEY! SQUIRREL!



  • @xaade said:

    the heavy stream of art majors, gender studies, and such...

    If it isn't engineering, it is completely useless! Why won't people understand that?



  • Kind of a false dilemma, because it assumes that conservatives think free-market is flawless.
    Rather than many conservatives see free-market is being flawed, but less so than other socialized markets.

    At the same time, conservatives perceive progressives to imply that socialized markets are flawless, which I'd be hesitant to insinuate.



  • If the purpose is to increase earning, I would like to see how you'd use a gender studies degree to do that.

    Otherwise. :moving_goal_post:



  • @xaade said:

    Be ready to have millennials demand they get to have all the money you put into it, and they didn't, redirected to them.

    Be ready to have retards claiming that one random person on the internet gets to set policies now. :rolleyes:

    Picture perfect example of taking one singular data point and blowing it all out of proportion. Moron.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @jmp said:

    The Guardian article it links to claims that several countries have had the under-30 contingent become poorer in real terms over the last x-ty years, which if true should be a fairly obvious 'something is wrong' indicator.

    And I'll bet the reasons are different across countries. Lots of places in Europe seem to have really stagnant job markets for young people. OTOH, in the US, the education bubble is resulting in massive amounts of student debt (often for ridiculous educations). On the property front, at least in the US, young people like to live in cities, which are of course very expensive.

    Personally, I'm doing pretty well, but I can tell you that my father, who retired a couple of years ago still makes more than me with his pension plus Social Security. He's definitely not representative, though more retired people are going to have things like homes paid off and don't have the expenses of raising children, which has a huge impact on disposable income.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @flabdablet said:

    Liberal satire of Conservative economic logic goes like this:

    FTFY



  • Satire still contains a kernel of truth, though.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    Just not the truth he thinks it has.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @jmp said:

    US GDP growth hasn't been significantly above 5% since ~1980.

    Actually, it's most informative to look at the histogram of different rates over a substantial amount of time (since investment for retirement is naturally a multi-decade affair) as the histogram stops you from looking at the details too much. That link was quite informative, since it lets us see that we ought to expect the longer-term GDP growth rate to be centred around the 2%–4% range (quantisation makes it harder to be more accurate than that). We should therefore not expect even the 5% you used; a rate of 3% would be much more realistic.

    Unfortunately, using the same treatment with any of a number of reasonable inflation measures indicates that the long-term rate at which prices increase is very similar to the GDP growth rate. There's very little growth in real terms to be had. You can set money aside, but you're effectively just postponing your spending (though at least without really losing out) and not actually getting richer.

    My take? The Boomers had better watch out, as they'll be going into nursing homes soon, and those will be either very expensive (to grind as much money out of people as possible) or really horrible. The generation after them won't be particularly inclined to be very careful about this either, and the Boomers are reaching the stage where their numbers (and hence political strength, which is what is currently actually protecting them) will be starting to fall. It'll be cruel.



  • @boomzilla said:

    Just not the truth he thinks it has.

    And not the truth you think it has either.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    Oh, buuuuuuurn!



  • ITT: a good old fashioned circlejerk about how stupid/evil "millenials" are.

    Because you can totally generalize from an article to 40% of the population I guess?



  • @jmp said:

    In order to earn $100,000$50,000/year from your assets, well you're going to need a lot of assets. $2$1 million dollars at 5% interest would do it, for example. Lets say you've been earning $100,000 for a long time and save half of it each year, meaning you've had $50,000 per year to live on, and reinvest the 5% interest. How long would it take you to have $2$1 million in assets?

    ~22/2314 years, according to the compound interest calculator I just looked up (initial deposit $0, compounded monthly, deposits monthly).

    FTFY. To compare apples to apples, you need to compare your retirement income to your income prior to retirement minus what you were putting into investment. If you made $100,000 but put $50,000 into savings, you were living on an annual income of $50,000.

    @jmp said:

    How plausible is that, do you think? Keep in mind I haven't accounted for tax, dunno how that affects things. 5% is probably too low a return on your asset, but saving half your income is ludicrous and obviously you won't be earning that much for 20 years.

    How's this for more reasonable: You could make $60k per year, save a meager 15% or $750/mo, with an 8% annual return, and retire after 23-24 years earning more in monthly interest than the $4,250 you were living on previously.

    And that's also completely disregarding the fact that you can also start gradually spending the principal that you've saved.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @anotherusername said:

    8% annual return

    That's the bit that it's currently difficult to get. When the return is, say, just 1% (over inflation) the amount that you have to save and the length of time you have to do it for are enormously longer.



  • @boomzilla said:

    Personally, I'm doing pretty well, but I can tell you that my father, who retired a couple of years ago still makes more than me with his pension plus Social Security. He's definitely not representative, though more retired people are going to have things like homes paid off and don't have the expenses of raising children, which has a huge impact on disposable income.

    That's my point.

    People are jumping the gun when they say it's not right that retired people have more disposable income.

    You have to determine the reasons first.

    @anonymous234 said:

    Because you can totally generalize from an article to 40% of the population I guess?

    I'm a millennial too. I don't agree with the ideas here.


Log in to reply