Just because someone "can" incur high costs of care as a senior does not mean that everyone will, that is alarmist.
It's the average cost. Source is Fidelity Investments, who have been doing a survey for a long time.
https://www.fidelity.com/viewpoints/retirement/retirees-medical-expenses
Not saving properly for retirement becomes a matter of education, as with most things there is an alternative to what the government has ended up doing. It is an alternative not very well liked because it removes government dependence....
We can say, viably, that it's up to the individual to save for retirement. At the same time, fields like cognitive science, behavioral economics and neuroeconomics are showing more and more that saving for later goes against very powerful biases such as discounting (i.e. preferring $50 today to $100 in 2 years). I.e. in some cases, government can help people help themselves, by encouraging them to put money away, or by making a deal that you pay a certain type of tax when you're younger in exchange for benefits later.
And no, I don't think people want to increase dependence upon the government. It's that the government is better suited to something like "providing consistent benefits to the elderly" than a charity. A charity will have inconsistent cash flows, may arbitrarily decide to stop servicing an individual or a community, may try to impose certain beliefs and practices on recipients, and so on.
Michigan, really Detroit, is a problem they themselves created. Yes, those workers should leave and find employment elsewhere. There was no sound reason for Detroit to do what they did and end up in the mess we all watched....
So, wait. The people who worked for the auto factories are responsible for companies outsourcing and automating their jobs away? People are supposed to abandon their homes the instant they lose their jobs? What about people who own their homes, their schools? They're supposed to abandon the community that you say will do a better job of taking care of them? Where are they supposed to go, that guarantees jobs?
I was also referring to suburbs like Flint, but since you brought it up: Detroit is a mess largely
because people started abandoning the city in the 1960s, and in an independent (i.e. disorganized) manner. Tax revenues were falling, even as the population density was falling, but the area that need services (cops, fire, utilities, schools) did not fall.
You came up with the number, it is a bit presumptuous to then turn around and say others cannot explore that usage.
Scare quotes is not a method of exploring the claim. You could have searched, or just asked.
Barbara Lee says 60 percent of people on food assistance are working | PolitiFact
At the same time we do not run 40% unemployment at any income quintile so I still contend that "60% of all those expected to work do work" is a clear showing of system failure. I would argue dependence has bred further dependence and here you are making an argument to keep this going.
A few points here.
1) I don't see any evidence that our society actually has enough jobs to employ 99% of the people who we expect to work (i.e. adults, not disabled, not senior citizens)
2) I don't see any evidence that the higher-paying jobs are right there, ripe for the picking.
3) I don't see any evidence that people are not trying to earn more money because they are involved in the safety nets.
4) A very significant chunk of those collecting benefits are retirees. I do think we can make a good case to increase age limits on some programs, but that is (yet again) a
very far cry from eliminating all welfare.
Cuts to everything would be on the table. The harsh truth is we do not have an economy and tax code that generates enough tax revenues to cover our spending, as evidenced by Total Debt going up every year with striking consistency.
Except when Clinton was in office...
And it's not really that "harsh" or as much of a threat as is so routinely claimed. Yes, we need to both increase revenues and cut spending. Yes, taming medical costs, including for seniors, ought to be a part of that. No, it is not required to slash all safety nets to get there. (And obviously, the claim that "benefits create dependency" and "we can't afford it" are two very different arguments.
Another item to consider is that if we rely on community charities to help the poor, then the same amount of money will basically have to be transferred from those with wealth, to those who do not have it. Merely slashing benefits is not going to magically produce decent-paying jobs overnight, which means the needs will still be there.
And as already pointed out in this thread, many people think about dollars in nominal dollars, not real terms -- this is known in behavioral/neuroecon terms as the "money illusion." To avoid this, we are typically better off considering it in terms of something like the debt-to-GDP ratio (already posted), which looks far less scary.
Social Security was another problem we entirely made worse with "feel good" intentions devoid of economic and fiscal sense....
Social Security is facing a number of
demographic issues that no one could reasonably foresee in the 1930s.
In addition, Social Security
can be fixed. It is far easier to say than to enact, but: Increase revenues a little bit, push back the date of collection, perhaps invest some of the Trust Fund in open markets, cut some other benefits, and it will be more solvent. (I also think we should legalize a lot of currently-illegal immigrants who are under 35, and make them pay payroll taxes, to smooth out the big Baby Boomer hump.)
I agree we should have adjusted some of this gradually rather than do it in one big rush, but again you're fighting fundamental human nature here. Which is why our politicians pull bonehead maneuvers like cutting taxes while waging two wars.
The bottom line is we have created Social Safety Net traps. Having a record low labor participation rate and huge disparity among the income quintiles does not negate that we have way too many people on one or more forms of government assistance and for way too long.
And yet, there doesn't seem to be a correlation between the availability of those safety nets and labor force participation rates. I wonder why?
Well, I'm not sure, but I strongly suspect it is linked to what has
really been going on in the labor market. Namely: Men have been leaving the labor force steadily since the 1950s. Women, in contrast, were joining the labor force until around 2000, and then started leaving it:
This does not jibe with the idea that "adding safety nets reduces the will to work." We don't see a big drop in participation in the 1960s, when the Great Society reforms started kicking in. We don't see a big rise in participation when the Clinton welfare reforms went into effect. Social Security hasn't changed much since the 1950s, so why would total participation go up until 2000 and then fall?
And again, it is unclear that the jobs are there in the first place. They certainly weren't during the Great Recession.
