The retirement funding problem is also related to depopulation. Social Security started in the US in 1935 and there were 9 working age people for every one retired person. This is dropping to one working age person to one retired person. If we tax 40% of the working person wage, then after paying for the government there is 10% to pay retired people. How far can an old person get on 10% of the money of one working person?
Larry Fink has a net worth of about $1.2 billion and controls the $10 trillion Blackrock fund assets.
Social Security system that has said it will not be able to pay full benefits by 2034.
The 71-year-old believes the American retirement system has entered such a deep crisis that it has become a once-in-a-generation issue.
Fink said it is worth taking a look at when Americans are expected to start accessing Social Security benefits, typically a sensitive topic that no politician wants to touch. He noted potential solutions including either raising the age for benefits or finding ways to encourage working later.
“No one should have to work longer than they want to,” he said. “But I do think it’s a bit crazy that our anchor idea for the right retirement age, 65 years old, originates from the time of the Ottoman Empire.”
Increasing lifespans create further difficulties when trying to improve the retirement system, Fink said. This issue is of increasing relevance as blockbuster weight loss drugs have already begun drastically reshaping the health-care landscape. [aka He believes weight loss drugs that work will make people healthier and live longer and need more retirement funds.]
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
I find it amusing that social security is always the first topic of conversation when cuts need to be made. Welfare is never part of that discussion.
Did none of you enjoy your jour job. I simply took jobs I liked doing. Because I liked them I was good at them and my employer was good to me. So I worked for as long as I could and retirement is well funded if boring. Doing work that I hated for 50 years never appealed.
Well I can tell you Old Folks Homes are Full of Females. My Daughter has worked at many of them, probably 75% or more residents are Women. Most of the Men are long gone.
Calling it. Talking about health is a red herring.
He’s worries he’ll be the next Bernie Madoff and he’s just playing for time now.
ESG as a loan qualifier was a loser. Lead to funding too many unsustainable businesses that ended up being cash grabs with good PR, will never return on investment, and instead fold after the money evaporates. The Mutual funds are mismanaged and a higher retirement age would give these large funds breathing room to try and repair the damage or at least stagger on until their current leadership is out of the law’s reach.
We have state and town workers here in Rhode Island retiring with a pension after 30 years….20 for police and fire and I’m sure they sleep good at night….so don’t lay a guilt trip on me Larry for collecting my S.S. at age 67.
Actually a fair number of police/fire will go get another job after the have full pension benefits so that they can collect a second pension.
Fink is a Fink. According to this article, Larry Fink has a net worth of about $1.2 billion and controls the $10 trillion Blackrock fund assets. Let’s all take unwanted financial advice from someone who has used extreme tactics to take wealth from other people.
If I got to live to be over 120 while being able-bodied, it would be worth it to still be in the workforce . I would rather be in a supercentenarian that’s still working if I was in good health than be a 70+ year old retiree who’s bedridden.
Now, when I say in good health, I don’t just mean still breathing who lying in bed helpless waiting for the Grim Reaper to take you. I mean being someone who is functionally in their 40s or even 50s even though they’re chronological much, much older. Then again, for someone to live past 120, the ravages of aging would have to slowed greatly or even reversed anyway.
You are sounding like a fool and I’m certain you have not paid into social security. Majority us blue color workers by the time we reach age 65, we would have well put into 35 to 45 years of work. We are tired, bodies are broken down, suffered illnesses both mentally and physically
If they want to stop social security then start with giving everyone who paid into it all of our money back.
Work until you drop, that’s ignorant. We need to be able to enjoy some our life not punching a clock for people like you.
Did your mother or father work until they dropped? If so, kudos. But we are not your momma or daddy.
I’m getting so tired of million dollar people like you 😒 trying to dictate if we should collect what we paid into and when to.
Refunding the money we’ve paid into social security isn’t good enough, it would need to be paid back and interest of 10% compound annually for every year we’ve paid in weeks also need to be added to that payment. That’s money we could have had invested elsewhere if it wasn’t stolen from our paychecks.
If we reduced the Defense Budget to be more in line with what other Countries spend; Instead of the 3/4 of a Trillion Dollars we spend annually. Particularly, since the U.S. has Not won a War, decisively since WW2. And taxed a percentage of a fraction of 1% of Every Wall Street stock transaction; This Countrie’s Money Problems would be Over. BUT, we are to afraid to Tax the cash cows that are putting this Country in this financial predicament.
USA funds a large part of other countries defenses that is the problem……and taxing more never fixes the SPENDING PROBLEM
What you wrote was utter nonsense. If we reduce our defense spending to ZERO, it doesn’t fix the SS nor the Medicare problem long term. Blame President Johnson, he created Unified Accounting and that allowed our politicians to spend the SS surpluses on all the other B.S. that government does and then have an I.O.U. replace it, saying that the government would pay it back with interest from future tax takings. Social Security was a ponzi scheme from day 1. And also stop going after rich people. You had most of the opportunities that the average person with a net worth of a million dollars had and you didn’t do it. Stop being jealous.
IF we reduced defense spending to be “in line” then we wouldn’t be able to even pay the interest on the debt. Reducing defense spending would not usher in some kind of utopia. Taxing 1% of stock transactions would not raise anything near enough money and people would perform fewer transactions.
I don’t think you are really dealing with the magnitude of annual $3 trillion deficits. Massive deficits and inflation are a fact of life for the next decade because that is the easiest path forward for government(s). The end game is inveitably currency collapse due to inflation.
I can empathize. But from a financial standpoint, most SS beneficiaries receive every penny they ever put into the fund by their 3rd full year of retirement, and every penny their employer contributed by the 6th full year. Every payment after that comes from current contributions by others; the “trust fund” is a spreadsheet mirage. I will retire at age 67 and 10 months, and expect to live at least to the male average of 82 (my genes may be good for 95, given my heritage). By age 77 I will be digging into the contributions of others in the workforce. SS was designed to only pay out for a couple of years (retirement at 65 based on a male life expectancy of 67 on average); is was not built to pay out for 16 years. Since it’s funding model is a Ponzi scheme, it won’t work unless late entrants outnumber early entrants 10 to 1. That means taxes will go up and benefits will go down. It is just a question of when.
They know males dont hardly live past 67 ?cant retire now till 72?not fair too us males?work our whole lives and being forced to work till we die? Not fair to us men
Spot on.
We will have robots, and robot work will be taxed so we won’t have to work too much. Problem solved.
The problem with working until you drop is that older employees are more expensive due to healthcare expenses, the greater number of vacation days, and usually higher salaries. Corporations want them gone.
We’re cheaper because, mostly, we’re not ignorant young fools who, mostly, wreck as much as they make. We show up on time, sober and ready to work.
We are also prodigiously productive because we already know how things work.
Fink also has a proven track record on supporting policies and actions that benefit only the elite and tend to work against the general public. He is a big promoter and leader in the WEF that has a documented goal of 90% Global Depopulation and also works toward the people owning nothing. Countries that have slowing population growth have the biggest challenges with retirement funding.
Agree fully that most corporations will not employee most personal as they grow older which is common knowledge in those corporations. Sure, some countries try to protect age discrimination but it normally still happens. Interviewing as an older person tends to be torture even with a great resume and good health. Extending the social security retirement age will just make this issue more of a problem. I expect that older people not able to financially retire on their own, will have to take low paying work anywhere they can find it while also not yield much quality of life.
trust me Larry wants this for other companies, not Blackrock, for this precise reason. He’s firing his older workers pressuring them to leave replacing them with 20 somethings and AI. Larry serves Larry end of story.
Well if we had Healthcare for all in the UnitedStates, like other developed Countries; We could prevent people from getting so expensively Sick in the first place; By providing Preventive Care.
Working till the end, if you can and do enjoy your work- is rewarding for reasons other than personal money, failure of SS, and national productivity. It’s also psychologically good for *some* people. Retirement rushes in death often more than anything else. An engaged mind doing things familiar to them can survive longer and healthier. I stress *some* and optionally of course.
If you work at a desk. Work a trade and see how you feel after 50 years
The objections made to transfer taxing for payments here illustrate the instability of UBI which is a much larger such system than Social Security with an even more dramatic ratio between taxpayers and recipients. If the payers feel they are victims the system is unstable.
Wage labor is going away with jobs because of AGI and robots. An alternative is not a choice or a luxury, the economic system needs to be fundamentally changed or society will fail completely. This is more urgent and important than either the threat from population collapse or retirement system insolvency.
What’s needed is a system that provides what might be called Universal Basic Wealth rather than UBI based on transfer payments. This requires finally recognizing that there are large classes of property that should never have been considered private property or commingled with Capital that ultimately derived from labor or just lawful exchange. These classes of property are much like property in Labor Capacity (slavery). They represent an inherently unjust class of private property rights.
If all wealth that should justly be owned inalienably by everyone in equal shares was recognized as being in this class, the fruits of this wealth equally distributed to everyone would be sufficient to live well without wages or transfer payments.
The classical name for this sort of property is “Land” as opposed to Capital or Labor but that can be confusing. Examples of it that matter are Intellectual property (other than the temporary tranche given creators of new IP) including AI and its creations, Carbon fees and other rents for pollution, EM spectrum rents, property in resources in the oceans, on the moon or asteroids or anything off the earth, etc. Traditional existing Land title itself can be excluded in practice to avoid conflicts because it has become commingled with Capital.
The notion is that all wealth that pre existed without labor should be owned inalienably in equal shares. The fructory rights would yield payments. The payments would come from use rights available in free markets for rent. The administration and distribution handled by AI run DAOs.
If everyone had an equal share of this class of wealth by birthright, the cost burden of raising children would be eliminated. Children would pay for their own upbringing. Much of the cause of population collapse would be eliminated. There would be no need for transfer payments based on taxes. Legitimate Capital derived from labor or lawful exchange would remain private and free markets would be the basis of the economy, though mostly involving activities of AIs and robots.
I RESERVE THE RIGHT TO BE WRONG, AND TO CHANGE MY MIND.
Conversely instead of nationalizing the land/real property (Which would be very hard to convince people of). Any country could simply pass laws stating that they now owned 1/5th of every corporation, and business. Order the shares simply be new issuance in that ratio. Diluting the current ownership. Then regulate/simplify the dividends and profit taking. Then pay out the profits of every value addition entity on a per capita basis. You order that the ratio of public interest will always remain at a 1/5 (20%) ratio to prevent dilution, or over encumbrance due to share buyback.
You retain but simplify personal income tax, so that you maintain the personal influences that the penalties and benefits introduce. The progressive tax scales.
For certain you could lower the corporate taxes. I don’t know if you could eliminate them.
However, the corporations would still be free to act the way they do. After all if they had bigger profits the public per capita payments would be bigger.
The consumers would still be able to spend, and the benefit would trickle up.
Possibly an easier UBI system that is accommodating of future automation and AI. It would also be scalable to market ups and downs. It would be important to possibly moderate the individual payments, to protect against market highs and lows, but just as important to permit the ups and downs to scale the real costs.
“Diluting the current ownership.” OK for all those people who have been saving for retirement through investments, 401Ks, etc., you just diluted by 1/5 the value of their portfolios. All in the name of keeping SSA solvent? Personal income tax should be flat. Everyone, with a few exceptions, everyone should have skin in the game. As for corporations being free to act as they want . . . really in light of recent Fed agency rule making, that doesn’t exist.
“Any country could simply pass laws stating that they now owned 1/5th of every corporation, and business.” – What happens to the value of those investments when every investor divests and leaves the country? I wouldn’t invest in Venezuela or Russia; why would I invest in countries that behave this way?
I think you are vastly underestimating the number of people who are investing for retirement who are willing and able to run your genitals through a cheese grater if you try something like this.
Hmmm, genuine equality and fair shares of everything. Ultimate decentralized power. Like it.
Pfft. I’ll work harder and buy his share. Just like that there is inequality.
It’s easy to forget that, when SS was first begun in the US, the retirement age was set at just a few years less than the average life expectancy.
The male life expectancy was about 67 years at the start of SS, for women 74. So it was fully expected that about half of men would die before qualifying, and it was pitched as a way to support widows in their old age after their husbands had passed on. Men were hardly expected to collect anything, actually. That was what made the program look affordable!
From that perspective, the retirement age should probably be about 75 at this point.
The problem is that, while it was a pay as you go charity for widows and orphans, they pretended it was a retirement pension that you personally paid into and then got your money back, purely for public relations purposes.
And then they set the taxes for it high enough to fund a good chunk of the government, while squirreling away IOUs instead of actually investing the taxes.
Personally, I’m 65, and will qualify for full SS in about 18 months, but I don’t begrudge raising the age to get it, that’s just rational. I begrudge having been forced to pay into it in the first place! I could have afforded a real pension for the amount of money they took from me over the years…
It was designed as a social insurance system. That’s why it included multiple sorts of insurance for the sorts of things a person otherwise needed to accumulate assets and goodwill to protect against. It covered widows and orphans and burial expenses. The “retirement” portion was just coverage for the unlikely possibility that you might survive long enough to be unable to work and become a burden to your family.
In essays from that period it was very much designed to address the changes that came from people migrating from farms to urban areas and losing the ability to provide for their own future as well as they might have.
Social Security is ludicrously expensive widow-orphan insurance. I aldeady have several of those insurance plans and they pay out far more than Social Security ever will at a fraction of the cost.
SS was a tax with a promise of long distant benefits. Some may call it a ponzi but it was solvent so long as there were far more workers than retirees, which is what usually happens when people have kids.
Growth shouldn’t be required to prosper. Eventually no more room for growth. Prosperity needs to be possible with the status quo. Or a new system needs to be created which does this. This is a fallacy of governments and corporations alike.
Stop your whining Brett. Just lift the cap and SS will be fine. You can work extra years for me. I am out at 63 this year and plan to enjoy myself. Loser.
Amen. I’m already collecting social security, but need to work to afford to feed my family. Still in save mode. Looking for part time jobs to keep me solvent. Law makers are avoiding the elephant in the room which is remove or raise cap. They don’t want to pay taxes.
Agreed. And I’m 58, have paid into this system since age 13. I was sold a lie. Taxed for a scam. What the heck do I do now? Had 10 to 25% of my income been taken out and set aside in an investment for my retirement…oh yeah…that’s what we were told was happening. How about a refund?
Bush wanted to do that 20 years ago. He was hammered for wanting to end SS.
There will be no fixes. We will just print money to pay government’s bills because that is the political path of least resistance. If you don’t have a fixed rate mortgage then you are effectively doomed and inflation will act like a tax that prevvents you from accumulating enough money to retire.
I have an idea lets just lift the cutoff for SS taxes from 125K to NO CUTOFF. Then SS will be funded fully. The feds with their never ending wars and huge tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations has borrowed and spend the SS reserve. Now that they cannot pay it back they want to take SS away.
Who pays the majority of ALL NET TAXES in the country? Which tax bracket pays the majority of the INCOME TAXES in this country?
Mainly to fund the the Blackrock share holders – not to keep the life going!
Larry Fink is so wrong it’s hard to know where to begin, aside from starting with the moral argument that it’s immoral to let starve and go homeless millions of seniors over 67 – not 65 if you were born after 1959 – instead of paying them social security, the most successful anti-poverty program for seniors ever invented.
From two studies I quoted in my book, “America is Not Broke!”:
Although the economic literature, green-eyeshade
accountants, pundit bloviaters, and ideological ranters, love to ask “How to pay for Social Security,”142 143 they are all asking the wrong question.
The right question is “What is the Social Security
Multiplier?”…Says AARP:
A new report from AARP, in fact, shows that every $1 paid out by Social Security generates, in turn, about $2 of total output for the U.S. economy – or nearly $1.4 trillion in 2012.145
And a paper from the Southern Rural Development Center says:
Similarly, results of an economic impact analysis of OASDI payments at 2009 levels…indicated an output multiplier of about 1.8 in the U.S. economy. As such, every dollar paid in OASDI generated an additional 80 cents in the economy. To put it another way, the $675 billion paid in OASDI benefits during 2009 translated into an economic output of slightly over
$1.2 trillion dollars in the U.S. economy.146
So, this means that there is a net gain for every dollar spent on Social Security and, though this is somewhat controversial, it may be as high as double the expense.”
====
The numbers 145 & 146 refer to the endnotes where I cite the studies specifically. If you want to know that, you’ll have to buy my book, still available on Amazon.
Social Security in terms of the economic impact can be thought of as a giant stimulus program, where retirees get to decide how government money is spent, supporting millions of people in thousands of businesses. Without it, we’d have a very deep depression. And no, people can’t save for the most part for a 20-year retirement – what you typically have left if you make it all the way to 67. Before SS, when old people outlived their savings, family and the poorhouse, they starved and died. And that was when there were hardly anyone living more than a couple of years past 65. There’s no other way to support people with our increasing lifespans (I do hope Fink is at least right about the weight loss drugs extending life).
You’ll know SS payouts are too high when people start saving SS instead of spending it to consume.
As for UBI, I attended a lecture last night by an economist who pointed out that we could pay for that by channeling excess productive capacity to a UBI instead of having the Fed try to dampen inflation with higher interest rates. He believes we encourage people to work at pointless work, just to force money into people’s hands both for them and for the economy to keep going. We could just give them money instead. He agrees with the MMT people who say debt doesn’t matter so long as you have spare human and natural resource capacity. I think it does because there are better ways to get money into the economy than by paying it to a few already wealthy people to hold Treasuries. But it is true that a monetarily sovereign government (unlike states or the EU countries) can create money at will, infinitely. We did it during the Civil War with U.S. Notes issued directly by the Treasury Department (aka Greenbacks) and U.S. Notes were officially in circulation until 1996, and are still listed in the official quarterly U.S. Debt Report as NOT debt, unlike Federal Reserve Notes.
You forget the private sector can and does much better than a doubling of money by retirement.
Everything you’ve mentioned is worse when done by the government.
The private sector can’t do what SS does. Private pensions disappear when companies do. Even vetted 401ks are vulnerable to stock market gyrations, which can be 50% or more and if they occur when you’ve just retired, it can ruin your supposed retirement fund.
You should listen to Scott Baker and me. He knows his numbers. Everyone with even a passing familiarity about white collar fraud know that the real agenda underlying the privatization push for social insurance programs is looting, plain and simple. Many if not most corporate “retirement” funds have been looted in some fashion as fraud in America has been desupervised and decriminalized. Buybacks are a particularly pernicious method, but companies routinely “invest” their own retirement savings – in themselves, which fails even the most basic necessity for investment risk diversification.
Corporate America could easily fund defined benefits plans. Reading a statistical table and juggling a few interest calculations just isn’t that hard but crooked executives and their criminal consultant enablers just can’t keep their sticky fingers off the money. Executives aren’t around that long and the incentives for looting and short-term thinking are too great. The return of decent interest rates is a good start, but more is needed before private retirement is stabile. (You think social security is bad? Jeez. Look at all the public bailouts of private pension funds. Nobody pays to shine a light on those. You think the “news” covers what their corporate advertisers are doing to their employees and investors?)
You get what you pay for in politics and probably the greatest deficiency in our AWOL civics education is understanding who pays for what policies in politics and why. The wealthy industries paying for the privatization of public insurance are the ones that have basically looted private banking and insurance for decades now. Thirty years ago, my father prosecuted an automotive insurance company (“Champion”) for looting $200 million in 1990 dollars out of their reserves and laundering them into off-shore accounts. The industry was pissed he did it and thirty years later, the open sewer of a campaign finance system we created has given Louisiana a state legislature that caters to every whim of an insurance industry that last year embezzled $600 million from their reserves for “investor compensation” without a single prosecution, despite the fact this forced several insurers to fail and pushed their policyholders onto the public guarantee fund, LIGA (which is its own looted mess). Champion sent the insurance commissioner to prison for more than twenty years. The state market now endures three “Champions” worth of fraud a year without any prosecutions at all.
The conclusion of our lobbyists/”legislature?”
“Oh. They’re overregulated. Yeah. When we fix that, we’ll be living in liberturdlia nirvana.”
These people are segregationists. Call them what they truly are. In the 1920s, right before the epic stock market crash for fraud, the KKK experienced a second rebirth as a multilevel marketing fraud in addition to your old-fashioned cross-burning terrorist organization. (“Gold sneakers anybody? Gold perfume? Jesus would have worn them. Snicker…”)
Regulations should be simple to follow and market-neutral so that large wealthy companies with complex legal staffs don’t benefit disproportionately at the expense of smaller competitors. But regulations should also be strong, protect the public from irreversible harm and routinely enforced. The regulated, regulators and writers of regulation should certainly never intermix their personal financial interests. Absolutely none of that is true today.
Through bank fraud, stock fraud, mortgage fraud and other shell games, this is what the industry underneath the SSN privatization push has always wanted: to steal your money while claiming to give you a great rate of return. Many of the posters here may lack formal education in these subjects, but they have a natural nose for a con job when they hear one. Trust me. The con man makes you feel great up until the day you discover what he’s done to you. (Then they’ll be back in hand asking for a “bail out.” Bail out the public. Deny the perp bail while he rots in jail.)
Everyone should obey the law.
But the law should also obey us. When the people no longer pick our lawmakers, laws are made to shatter public order, not support it. Like a coiled snake cracking open eggs to suck out the future potential inside, there are always short-sighted parasites who would destroy our investment in ourselves. They seize the law from us and squeeze us to death with it.
Short-sighted sociopathic billionaires just used SPAC fraud this week to lever up Trump’s net worth by several billion dollars so they could get tax cuts worth a hundred times more. Their purchasing of his antisocial media company occurred the same week that very same media outlet was used by Trump to launch attacks on the New York judge’s family in one of his criminal cases. This wannabe dictator hopes he can intimidate those who oppose his crimes with the threat of stochastic terrorism. These attacks on the rule of law are the kind of behavior these billionaires fund and encourage – which is absurd, considering this hooliganism is destroying the very same legal system that protects their vast wealth from being stolen in the first place. These are the same sociopaths salivating over our social security reserves.
“I was against Tik-Tok before I was for it. When a major Tik-Tok investor also bought my worthless company in a multibillion dollar freebie which has nothing to do with my flipflop.”
Wake up. Why do you think Trump is sending signals he’s going to privatize social security, now of all moments?
My father prosecuted Republicans and Democrats alike when they stole money and broke laws. He never thought he would leave me a world as racist and corrupt as this one. Unfortunately, I can’t say I’ve been surprised.
“Private pensions disappear when companies do.”
Please google “pension benefit guaranty corporation” and correct your misunderstanding. The federal gov backs up pensions.
“The private sector can’t do what SS does”
Compared to the private sector SS provides a horrible rate of return. At its absolute worst private sector may lose 50% but SS provides a guaranteed 25% ROI.
“Even vetted 401ks are vulnerable to stock market gyrations”
SS is vulnerable to dollar devaluation and has a lower payout compared to 401k. SS does not transfer to children, 401k does. 401k builds generational wealth, SS builds a bigger government.
“which can be 50% or more and if they occur when you’ve just retired”
Before you retire you are supposed to move money in to assets with a fixed rate of return like bonds.
The issue with UBI is how you increase “capacity” – and nobody really talks about the major problem of the last fifty years. We went from understanding that technology creates money to thinking, “No. Money creates technology. Sorry. Can’t invest in ‘X’ research ’cause, you know, tax cuts. No ‘budget’ for that.”
Technology creates budgets, not the other way around. And some of the numbers have been extraordinary the last few years. Basically, none of the marginal cost garbage you’re taught in Econ 101 brainwashing is true. Designing the first microchip might cost $1 billion, but after that, each extra chip is stamped out at about $1. Those are extraordinary cost curves. Musk talks about the machine that makes the machine. We took our eye off that ball.
I’ve been trying to explain a similar effect in medicine to no avail. The gliptins (ozempic, etc…) are a great example. They’re wonderful breakthroughs. But we don’t really need GLP-1 agonists until toxic food destroys natural gliptin production. We’re in a war of enclosure and, essentially, somebody’s pumping the air out of the room until we suffocate to death claiming the air hasn’t been through FDA testing – but, oh, by the way, we have FDA-approved pure oxygen bottles, just in case you need to breathe.
A century ago the FDA said, “Oh. You guys want to sell toxic processed pseudofood that’s never been tested for long-term safety but you want to claim it’s even better than real food? Sure. Go right ahead and create an epidemic of diabetes, obesity, cancer, autism, Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease and so on.” (Hint: yes, all this reduces lifespan, Larry.)
Then pharma comes along and says, “Hey. We found out GLP-1 levels are low in diabetics – for, you know, *some reason* – imagine that? – and Gila monster venom inhibits the breakdown of GLP-1 and this seems to help diabetics.” Sure. Put that on the market. (Don’t tell us what you were doing with the Gila Monsters to figure this out, though. Keep that between you and the lizard.)
Then science comes along from public universities and says, “Hey. We found out why GLP-1 levels are low. Yeah, so you need friendly gut flora digesting prebiotic fiber (aka inulin/FOS) in the diet to release GLP-1 to manage adiponectin, IL-10, AMPK, normalizing insulin and inflammation. Didn’t notice at first because this crappy food and antibiotics depletes friendly flora and it takes about eight months of fiber to rebuild a healthy microbiome. So we’re gonna sell prebiotic supplements to help out diabetics.”
“No, no. Wait. You can’t do that,” says the FDA. “You haven’t run a $30 million clinical trial to prove that prebiotic fiber is the solution for diseases caused by a lack of prebiotic fiber.”
Doh!
That’s like saying I need a clinical trial to prove that air is the solution to suffocation or vitamin A treats vitamin A deficiency.
I’d like to call this “government” but it’s not; it’s the opposite of democracy. It’s a privatized state seeking private profit through public institutions – aka, fascism (though, as a practical matter, on an operating basis, this isn’t a lick different than living under Communism).
They manipulated the risk assessment so that companies selling addictive drugs (aka “junk food”) could generate exclusive private rents with patented additives and processes and copyrighted/trademarked jingles and branding. The same inflammatory processes needed to make these products addictive also create diseases. Specifically, a palmitate(palm oil)/TLR4 microglia loop that drives opiate addiction also drives food addiction, insulin resistance, cancer development, chronic inflammation (both sterile and not) along with viral infections. And what a pernicious loop it is: LPS -> TLR4 -> fatty acid synthase -> palmitate -> TLR4…)
So these defective products create disease in the population which then, in the name of “medicine”, creates a market for patented, novel molecules never before seen in the human body. Both drive exclusive economic rents that hire lobbyists, pay for commercial on TV “news” shows (two-thirds of which are Pharma ad buys), campaign donations, etc… Basically, bribes to “news” and “political” leadership keep the truth covered up.
Cheap, public domain chemicals that remedy the problem in the first place are discouraged – to put it mildly – because this threatens the gravy train. Hardly anyone has the time to study the medicine, chemistry, economics and politics to figure out the whole picture. Sure. Angus Deaton talks about “iatrogenic medicine,” but he doesn’t have time to do the chemistry.
Mr. Fink is one of the major profiteers in this holocaust, though I doubt he’ll ever see it that way. As Upton Sinclair said, it’s hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it. His cognitively dissonant musings about social security and lifespan are dripping in irony.
To sum up: GLP-1 signaling is naturally stoked by friendly flora (which are killed by antibiotics and deworming agents), prebiotic fiber digested by these bacteria (e.g., butyrate), essential fatty acids in the diet (EPA, DHA). People are low in GLP-1 because somebody paid for them to be low in it. Replacing each of these items to restore normal GLP-1 functioning is much cheaper than ozempic. But you’ll never turn on a screen and hear about the war on nature because nobody’s going to run a $500m ad campaign on a chemical everybody else owns. This is why privatized education like advertising is disinformation for profit. The most pernicious enemies of the people are out there spreading “freebies.”
This is how we’re creating risks across the board that keep interacting and snowballing – by chopping off pieces of nature we depend on and we don’t understand to replace it with something “better” – whether it’s clean air, the soil-based organisms in our guts or cropland or the bees and insects we keep gassing that we count on for agriculture. We simply don’t “expense” or “budget” certain wealth-creation gifts from nature we take for granted.
Frankly, if you rolled back all the tax cuts and loopholes over the last fifty years and returned to the tax code circa 1970, there never would have been any fiscal deficits. College tuition would be much cheaper, along with rent and housing prices. We took on federal (and state) debt to shovel out corporate welfare to the rich.
Setting aside the easy taxation issues that will “fix” social security, why don’t we raise the retirement age? Because for some grinding physical professions like construction, American workers aren’t healthy enough to reach retirement age now. (That happens when you deny us affordable health care and good nutrition.)
None of this is the actual issue. Oligarchs have hated social security since its inception – almost a century now. It reduces the risk of poverty for working Americans. The objection is not logical but driven by simple class warfare. The more uncomfortable you make workers, the less their bargaining power and the less you have to pay them. Fink is outraged the government would provide a service to taxpayers – yet isn’t terribly upset when the government responds to his lobbying and subsidizes him and his businesses.
Universal Basic Income also reduces worker bargaining power too, which is why the gimmick has taken off in certain corners of wealth. UBI redirects wage demands away from the boss towards the government itself where they are much easier to kill with gridlock. UBI also makes it easier to kill unions. In addition, UBI is inflationary for no good reason. You’re throwing money at people for doing nothing which means more cash chasing the same number of goods and services. (This wasn’t what happened with Covid checks. For safety reasons, the government shut down economic activity during a deadly pandemic to prevent more harm and everyone affected was owed some kind of compensation for this “taking.” Government spending preserved economic capacity that was temporarily suspended but otherwise would have been permanently destroyed.)
While UBI makes sense for supporting a certain minimal living standard, UBI has been tried before for workers more generally and has failed for exactly the reasons I mention.
The appropriate response to help the poor is a universal jobs guarantee so they can do something productive. The job doesn’t have to be fantastic, just hone valuable, marketable skills and contribute to society so people can have some dignity and respect. (For instance, you could pay moms and dads or neighborhood watch or babysitters and tutors.) A job guarantee takes workers out of the free (unemployed) labor pool where they might lose hope and skills. Fewer unemployed workers lowers supply of free labor and drives up wages. Higher wages drives productivity.
This is the “conservative” approach since it fosters work – but when you hear the “conservatives” object to job guarantees, you start to realize what they’re really doing. They’re not helping the poor; they’re punishing them.
Fink’s heartless comment is a microcosm of this long history. His reasoning is blind ideology unrooted for anything actually related to “saving” social security. Make no mistake; the aim here is to kill it.
Fascism is the belief that big business should own and operate the public government for private profit. The attacks on full employment, social security and other prudent public insurance programs is about class warfare and control. I refer you to the work by Kalecki on the business class’s opposition to full employment except under formally fascist regimes: “Political Aspects of Full Employment.”
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2012/08/political-aspects-of-full-employment.html
The widespread misunderstanding of history, politics and economics is the central goal of this defunding of education. You can’t vote against your interests unless you don’t know what they are.
Guaranteed job is not an option because some creatures like mad dogs are a liability to have on the premises. Then if behaving like a mad dog exempts them from work they will all do it.
The tax code exists within a larger regulatory framework. Returning to the tax code of 1970 might work, but only if we revert to 1970 regulations as well. Goodbye OSHA, EPA, DOE etc. as well as going back to the gold standard. Otherwise, you’re just cherry-picking and it’s disingenuous.
The idea of a pension itself is absurd. A person must live as long as he works and provides for himself or someone is willing to voluntarily provide for him.
Sounds good to me. Give me my money back
This is also a world in which responsible people would have a far higher pension. Can you imagine how wealthy you’d be if you could have invested the money instead of having it stolen for the social security ponzi?
Given that this is like the seventh or eighth posting I’ve seen in here on the depopulation trend, you guys are clearly obsessed with it. Perhaps you guys can do a favor and at least agree that there is no longer a legitimate non-technical argument against the development and roll out of antiaging life extension.
Anti aging life extension is rolled out. Skeptics sneer. Religious believe their god intended them to die. Some effort and change of behavior is required, including no bungee jumps. Very few take the cure. This is good.
Do tell. How can I live to 130?
By using revolutionary treatments that’re just around the corner!
Of course Commercial Nuclear Fusion plants have been “just around the corner” since the 1950’s ……………
https://healthnews.com/news/revolutionary-anti-aging-breakthroughs-are-on-the-horizon/
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/slow-ageing-t-cells
> By using revolutionary treatments that’re just around the corner! <
Snake oil will be dirt cheap!
Just give “life extension” researchers MORE money… do not ask that they ‘prove’ their research works… there is no time! send your money now!
Same story, different people …since time began
He is likely wrong and might not taking rise in productivity and the fast-approaching age of robotics and A.I. Unless he isn’t a fan of those technologies helping humanity to reach a point where we don’t need to work as often and can increase our quality of life while productivity continues to increase.
He’s not wrong about social security reaching a breaking point. But, I think we’ll reach a point at which it might not be necessary, and without needing to work until nearly dead.
I think it’s all a mute point, we’ll have UBI, and will move to an “age of abundance”.
As for Social Security, it will disappear because UBI will be for everyone 18 & older.
That said, It has always been a massive Ponzi scheme, and just another way for the government to legally rob you. It always been absurd that you could start working at 14, finally retire at 65, and die the next day, pitching in to the “pot” your whole life, and not getting a single dollar back. Your offspring also don’t reap any windfall. It’s just absorbed up by are bloated government.
But to get back on topic and off my government rant, robots with AI will make humans doing most work laughable, they will be far superior to us.
Only for countries that minimize immigration and the ones so screwed up that people flee them as refugees.
No discussion of population is complete without discussing immigration. People in the US will be only modestly impacted by a shrinking China, South Korea, and Europe.
Incorrect, check history, even ours had strong limits on immigration during our best years.
In Denmark, the age of retirement depends on the year you were born, for the same reason.
They also have rules that cut into your pension if you have other income, giving an effective tax of 80-90%, so once you retire, noone works.
Another thing is the value of a 72+ year old in a workplace; can you pull your weight?
Fødselsdag Pensionsalder
1/7/1955 – 31/12/1962: 67 år
1/1/1963 – 31/12/1966: 68 år
1/1/1967 – 31/12/1970: 69 år
1/1/1971 – 31/12/1974: 70 år *
1/1/1975 – 31/12/1978: 71 år *
1/1/1979 – eller senere: 72 år *
The solution is to apply ordinary progressive income tax rates to Larry Fink and other Oligarch’s dividends, capital gains, and loans against their stock and other assets when net worth is over a reasonable threshold. You also remove the social security tax cap and apply it and the medicare tax to all income not just the wages of workers. All payroll taxes for that matter. They should not be payroll taxes but an income tax surcharge on all income.
This would be reasonable and fair. It would not harm the economy. It would help by reducing the burden on the workers. Our spending is someone else’s income. Workers have a shrinking proportion of the nations income. Those at the top have most of an increasing share of the nations income trending over multiple generations now. They don’t pay taxes when borrowing against their assets and if they sell they pay at a lower tax rate than workers and social security taxes aren’t applied to it at all. Maybe this doesn’t completely fix the problem but it would go a long way.
I do agree those capable of working should be working whether 27 or 77. Social security should be for those who can no longer work regardless of age. Still capable of working but want to stop working? Work Save and Retire Yourself. Also end public pensions. Why should I pay for others to collect a pension when they are still capable of working? Pensions should be for everyone or no one at all.
In this kind of discussion, we always forget to mention that productivity has risen sharply thanks to technological progress. Fewer people are needed to produce the same thing. On the one hand, Nextbigfuture shows us every day that AI will soon replace us all, and on the other, they want us to believe that we’re doomed if we don’t have more children. It’s not logical…