The 50-50-50-50-50 tax and economic plan.

I like the general idea of consolidating the social safety net into a single program. Certainly I prefer single-payer healthcare. I like the idea of mandatory retirement (it helps new generations find work), but at the same time I wonder if 50 is too young, considering life expectancies and the fact that you're basically forcing a lot of your most skilled individuals out of work at the peak of their careers.But it's rather difficult to comment further without seeing some real budget math...and I somehow doubt that you as an individual have the time or resources to calculate expected tax revenue under this plan and determine whether that single revenue source would be sufficient to pay for the rest of your plans after redundant programs are cancelled.I'm also not sure property taxes should be abolished. I don't necessarily think that a poor family in a $100,000 home (hey, I live in CA, that's a mud hut here) should pay a lot in property tax, but I do think that Donald Trump should pay some taxes on the real estate he uses to pay for the dead muskrats he wears on his bald head.And what about sales tax? I don't see a need to charge tax for food, but maybe we should be taxed on obvious luxury goods?In principle, though, your ideas make more social sense to me than any "flat tax" proposal I've seen from lolbertarians and Republicans.

Is it possible for a forum member to calculate anything remotely approaching an accurate projection for a tax/social welfare plan this far-reaching?I don;t think RAZD is going to be able to give us anything beyond the most basic numbers simply due to the limits f practicality.Perhaps we could discuss whether such a plan would be a good idea under the assumption that the budget would be balanced? I could imagine significant debate over the specific amounts being used, the fact that some are static numbers not tied to inflation and so will not provide the same benefit in 10 years that they would provide today, the mandatory retirement age, etc.I'd rather see some discussion on those lines rather than continually insisting on numbers that would require a Congressional committee and 6 months of research to calculate.

Does "mandatory retirement" actually translate to "no more employment, ever?"There are plenty of retirees who still work on occasion. Why should "mandatory retirement" mean something different from what it actually means today? My grandmother continued to work as a nurse part-time after officially retiring, both for money and because she found the work rewarding. My grandfather continued to work at a variety of jobs part-time after he retired. My other grandfather, a retired school principal, worked as a tutor.I can see some very good arguments against a mandatory retirement age as low as 50, but I'm not so certain that "you're mean for forcing all these people to never do anything productive ever again" is one of them.I'm more concerned that such a law would basically force the most skilled and experienced subset of the workforce into retirement. I'm not so sure that businesses can stand having that much knowledge and experience forcibly taken away.Personally, I think the universal paycheck would work to encourage optional retirement at earlier ages to the degree that making retirement mandatory may not be necessary to achieve the goal of increased turnover to make room for new graduates. A lot of people continue to work because they need to ensure they have enough money to survive their retirement, especially with people living longer (my grandparents expected to be dead by now, and while we're all glad they're not, their retirement planning would have been different had they known they'd live past their 70s; I don't think that's an uncommon problem). With a guaranteed livable wage and government-paid universal healthcare, retirement savings wouldn't be nearly such a motivation to continue working.

Can you point specifically to where you think he says that? Not that I don;t believe you, mind, I just don't feel like reading through the entire thread again to find it.That would be a significant departure from retirement today, where one can become officially "retired" and receive "retirement benefits" and continue to work if desired. I can agree with that, with my previous note that cutting out the most experienced employees does not seem to do a service to any business. If everyone over 50 retired tomorrow, I think my employer would lose something like 1/3rd of its employees, nearly all of them top-level.I think RAZD is correctly identifying a problem (too many new people entering the workforce, not enough jobs for all of them) and believes that the best way to resolve the issue is to force the older folks out so that the new employees can begin working. I'm just not sure that's the best solution - and even if it is, I think it would be better handled by incentivising retirement rather than requiring it. After all, one of the primary reasons for not retiring is money to live on after retirement, and RAZD's universal paycheck and universal "free" healthcare both seem to address the largest hurdles to financial security post-retirement. Under those policies, without forced retirement, I'd expect to see more people retiring earlier than presently, which may be sufficient to address the problem RAZD seeks to solve without such draconian measures.That said, many problems require more than one solution, and I think this is one of them. Fortunately, RAZD's proposal would allow for all of the new workers to also receive a universal paycheck and universal "free" healthcare, ensuring that all of them would be safe outside of employment if not necessarily happy, which attacks the problem of new-worker-unemployment from the social safety net end.The missing leg of the tripod is a policy to encourage employers to hire and train new workers, but it's acceptable that a single policy not address every problem perfectly. There seems to be no Grand Unified Theory of Public Policy, unfortunately.