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Member (Idle past 1405 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: |
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Author | Topic: The 50-50-50-50-50 tax and economic plan. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined:
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Prices will rise to meet the increase in income. Only if output can't be increased. With unemployment and underemployment high, factories idle, the abundant evidence is that there's plenty of slack in output to take up the increase in income. Prices won't rise as long as output can rise. Economics 101.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
mandatory retirement at 50. What does "mandatory retirement" mean?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
It means you stop working for somebody else. Or what? I mean, is that enforced by legislation? Is it illegal to employ someone older than 50? What about in an advisory capacity? Suppose you need a COBOL programmer or need to consult with the guy who designed the tires on the Lunar Rover. Is it illegal to work past the age of 50? What if your idea of retirement is running a wine bar or a youth hostel? Or developing apps for the iPhone? My father-in-law retired from being Dean of Students so he could drive a school bus a couple of times a week. It's just beer money for him, something to get him out of the house. I don't expect I'll ever really "retire"; I anticipate my twilight years will include revenue generation just for fun and extra scratch. Why not? What about granny porn?
But mostly it's included here because americans seem to have some kind of aversion to the whole idea of having lots of leisure time ... Obviously there are many people who can't afford to take the "leisure time" they desire to, but the notion that the culmination of a successful career should always be idle unemployment is an artifact of your generation, RAZD, not mine.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
LOL. Being told to get out and enjoy yourself is cruel? Yeah, RAZD. It's actually cruel to lock people out of gainful, meaningful employment. It's actually cruel to prevent employers from taking advantage of experience. Suppose that you're a 49-year-old working as a manager in a system of shelters for battered women. Over the years you've gained profound meaning in your life as you've sheltered the most vulnerable and shared their pain. Here's your birthday present - you have to quit and play shuffleboard or something, because the law says you can't work after 50. Of course it's cruel.
Remember that we have more job seekers than we have jobs, thus getting people to retire earlier is one way to allow everyone in the work force to benefit. Forcing experienced people into undesired permanent unemployment isn't the way to grow the economy.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Are you saying that it is not possible to live comfortably on $50/day? Or that you only get joy\happiness from work? Is there any place where I said either of those things? Now who's poisoning the well? I'm sorry, RAZD, but thinking of employment only as a mercenary exchange of your labor for money, with no personal meaning or fulfillment whatsoever, is an artifact of your generation, not mine. The notion that it's the culmination of a career to abandon it altogether is an absurdity. What was the point, then? Paying the bills? Why not just have had less bills?
Paint, write books, travel, take care of grandkids, volunteer to the peace corps, mentor at schools, walk from one side of the country to the other, or any number of thousands of other things. Except that under your law you can't do any of those things, for pay or for free, because painting, writing, caretaking, international development, and mentoring are all jobs that someone young could (and frequently are) paid to do, so by the justification for forced retirement in the first place, we can't allow oldsters to do those jobs for free because they'll displace a young person who needs the money. We pay people to write books, paint (my sister is a work-for-hire painter), and mentor, and if people in those fields are entitled to force 50-year-olds to make way for the new, that applies whether the 50-year-old is getting paid or not. The rationale that justifies mandated retirement for 50-year-olds also justifies preventing old people from doing anything that someone else could be paid to do. In fact, the justification is even greater due to the wage disparity.
There are more rewarding things to do than just working for pay week after week. Not everybody's job is just "working for pay week after week." If your own view of employment is that blinkered then it's no wonder you don't blanch at legally-mandated unemployment.
We can afford to lighten up the work load because there are more job seekers than jobs, we can afford to share the wealth of production improvements and an economy stimulated by increased spending. By all means, let's share the wealth. Mandated unemployment doesn't do that - it didn't do that in France, and it won't do it here. Let's just send checks to people and let them do whatever the hell they want - including meaningful employment.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Does "mandatory retirement" actually translate to "no more employment, ever?" RAZD says that it means that after age 50, nobody can hire you to do something.
There are plenty of retirees who still work on occasion. Sure; they retired out of one job and into another. Like my father-in-law. But RAZD's system means that since every job retires you out at 50, you're stuck in permanent joblessness because you can't legally be hired. Part of the problem, here, is that RAZD is from a generation where life expectancies were about 70 years; age 50 retirement, to him, means roughly 20-30 years of leisure with rapidly declining capabilities setting in at about age 68. But a woman just entering the workforce now is liable to live to be over 100, perhaps with full mental and physical capacity up into her 80's. RAZD's proposal allows people to work gainfully and productively for less than one-fourth of their natural lives. I don't see how you build a tax basis on so few employed people. I bat nary an eye at redistributive taxation, but RAZD's system sacrifices the young to the old.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Come on crashfrog, you're being silly here I'm trying to understand what you mean by mandatory retirement. I understand the concept of retirement. I'm trying to understand what you mean by it being mandatory. Who decides if someone has actually retired and therefore met the requirement? What criteria are used?
It means that you work for yourself to do the things you want to do. But what if you want to do things for someone else? Why do you insist that plus-50's aspire to everything but service?
You can run for public office. Public servants are employees of local, state, and Federal governments. Are those positions exempted from your "no employment of plus-50's" law, or what? I don't see how anyone plus-50 can run for public office under your mandatory retirement system.
You on the other hand seem to think that it is some kind of spiritually wonderful thing to be a prisoner of working for someone else. In every case? No, don't be an idiot. Most jobs suck, sure. But professors and teachers do work for someone else, and the teachers and professors I've met have, for the most part, found that employment deeply meaningful. Yes, even spiritual. Even a mentor is someone who works for someone else, any position of service is, and you can't tell me that mentoring isn't a meaningful and spiritual activity, and appropriate for retirees. In fact you even list it as a potential activity for retirees. One problem - a law mandating retirement at 50 means that plus-50's can't be mentors, because that's a job working for someone else. Again, we're getting hung up on a sweeping mandatory requirement to retire from whatever you're doing at age 50. The problem is, many things that retirees want to do are actually forms of employment.
The point is that you don't need to be working for pay week after week for someone else. Sure, I get that. But what about the people who want to work for someone else when they retire? Or who simply don't want to retire from the job they have? Whose idea of retirement is actually continued employment?
How do you define retired? How do you define it? That's why I asked you about your proposal. You're the one proposing a law that mandates retirement. How do you know when someone has met that requirement? What happens if they stubbornly refuse to quit their job when they turn 50? You're just being evasive. I'm not trying to trick you, I'm just asking what you could possibly mean by "mandated retirement at 50." What happens to me if, at age 50, I change absolutely nothing about my life or employment status and simply consider myself "retired"?
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