Back

@futurebird When you say "lowering retirement age" do you mean making people work for longer?

Another effect of people working longer is that the next generation are held back. Look at the Senate.

@futurebird Retired people also love learning, and are great students. If we had more retired people with more financial security, our colleges would have so many full writing courses, language courses, science and math courses. And they are so often mentors to younger students.

@futurebird my grandfather was forced to retire at 59 (effect of the country disintegrating, just Balkan things).

It's immeasurable how many great things for his wider community he got to do in the last 30 years of his life. I think about that all the time.

@futurebird I managed to retire at 58 ½ . I haven’t looked back and am having the time of my life.

@futurebird this is also why we have a neo-liberal system of student loans and work study, so that students don't have time to organize. Any longer... of course the generation that did this to the current generations got a lot more grants, didn't have to pay back their student loans (Biden, Reid, McCain Clinton made student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy,1998), and did both activism and self indulgent hippie shit with their their free boomer time, time that they deny their kids/grandkids.

@futurebird Retiring in 125 days, cannot wait to do the 4000 things on my list

@futurebird I retired at 61 and got to spend time with my brother then my friend as they went through separate terminal illnesses. I am so thankful that I wasn’t working and could just be with them as chauffeur, sounding board and company.

@futurebird I am 50 and if everything goes right (ha) I hope to retire at 60, minimum age for my employer’s few remaining retirement benefits. That decade feels so long right now. If it turned into 15 or 20 years… there would be a lot of crying. And probably my work productivity would nosedive.

@futurebird

This raising the retirement age BS is global. Every so often you see some serious guy on the news explaining with a serious voice how important it is to raise the retirement age.

Very true about the importance of older people to the community. My mum (retired teacher) helps immigrant mothers with their swedish and other education. This has helped several immigrant women to get a education and jobs.

@futurebird Retired people are often a safety net for younger working parents. We had teacher strikes in our province recently and thousands of grandparents cared for children. Also when children are home sick from school.

@futurebird I’m 56 and I agree with this! I have so much planned for my retirement, including many adventures with the grandkids

@futurebird A friend of mine who retired in his early 60s spent the last 25 years of his life helping low-income folks prepare their tax returns after realizing that many didn’t know about the EIC. Started a program w/a local nonprofit that became a model for state gov’ts. Probably helped hundreds of thousands of people, overall. I learned this at his memorial service.

@futurebird Retired at 62. Work the polls, am on the local dem committee, on the steering committee for an arts festival, do my hobbies, but I still consult part time because i love my field and it keeps my mind sharp.

@futurebird Not only that, GOP are specifically targeting Black life expectancy as they push the retirement threshold.

@futurebird I am 53. On Wednesdays, I volunteer at a church soup lunch. Often, I am the second youngest volunteer.

@futurebird For various reasons, I ended full-time work at 60. Since then, I have:
- Gotten an MS in Ethics and Public Policy
- Edited two philosophy books and a novel, two dissertations, and a plethora of articles and essays (for pay).
- Volunteered to help non-native speakers learn English and take the citizenship exam.
- Tutored my grandchild through the pandemic.
- Become the clerk of a grassroots environmental organization.
- Become a poll worker.
- Etc.

I hope I've given back...

@futurebird it’s true. My mum is in her 70s and has become a full on left wing activist. She also runs her local retirees community centre

@futurebird Between 1950 and 2016, remaining life expectancy at age 65 regardless of gender or ethnicity increased from 13.9 years to 19.4 years. That is, the average number of years spent in retirement if everyone was going to retire at 65 increased by about 40%. At the same time people spent more years and more money on getting an education. Something has to give. Either you raise eligibility age, increase payroll taxes, cut benefits or bankrupt social security. Which is it?

@joewein

Raise the cap. Add a few percent extra for those of us over 100k a year. That does it. More than does it. Technically they are always forced to be funded for a much longer period than other government operations. It's a bit extreme. But to the extent that there is an issue it's tractable.

I'm not convinced there really is a serious problem at this point.

@joewein You are trying to sneak in, between the lines, an assumption that a government has a fixed amount of money that it can spend.

That's a bullshit assumption. Have you never read even an elementary textbook of macroeconomics?

@futurebird

@joewein @futurebird worker productivity (economic output) increased year after year after year, it compounds, how has what the economic output of the US increased between 1950 and 2016?
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/economic-growth-rate

Now, something might need to give, but plausibly not what you are thinking.

@joewein @futurebird

What about the myriad of other options available to a government? You have created, effectively, a false dichotomy; those are not the only choices. Here in Australia our government, irrespective of Party, 𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘴 to spend a massive percentage of the GDP on supporting fossil-fuel enterprises, mining, private and religious schools, and the military; all while 𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 to keep social funding at an absolute minimum such that people receiving pension payments are below the official poverty level and the services offered for health, housing, and just living are almost nonexistent.

@futurebird I think retirement age should be the age past which employers don't want to hire folks for roles for which they're perfectly qualified. So right now, about 48.

@futurebird 22-25, enter the work force, 50 retire. Then you got 25ish years to enjoy retirement.

Of course a lot of people are still working in their 70s because they need the money.

@futurebird US resident, my take is retirement is very different case by case. About the time I retired at 69 we discovered that my wife has early-onset #alzheimers. Social Security, Medicare, and local University Hospital have done a good job. We live in a western red state where social services have been absolutely awful.

More than just retirement age. For people who like their job working into their 70s may be a positive thing. Other people may be hitting life-threatening issues by late 50s

@futurebird sounds good to me (I’m 59)

@futurebird You make a good argument that a younger retirement age is better, giving more people more years to do the unpaid work that benefits everyone.

Take this to its logical conclusion: A #UniversalBasicIncome is like retirement, without dictating when you're no longer allowed ro work for money. With #UBI (or #UniversalLivableIncome) there would be so many more people who end the rat race working for money just to stay alive, and now work for no money to make life better for all.

@futurebird

In Australia, it's now 67.5 for men, 65 for women; the plan is to push it to 70 for men soon. It's all about saving on government pension payouts, not the workforce or health, and it shits me up the wall.

Sure, if you WANT to keep working beyond pension age and you're capable, go for it. But forcing people to keep working, especially those not in office work, is criminal.