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This has always seemed so simple, which means they don't want to fix it. The two most obvious starting places would be easy political sells:

  1. Means testing
  2. Indexing eligibility to life expectancy

The reason Social Security sort of worked early on was that most people died before they could withdraw more than they had paid in.

There's a third element that I'd add to take a ton of pressure off the system:

  • Means testing for the family

Similar to child care, elder care should be a family obligation before it's a societal one.

105 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 9h

These things make sense to me. Why do you think there is no appetite to fix it? It's like a painful open sore...

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I always wonder about corruption when there's lots of money sloshing around and no one is interested in looking into where it's going.

There's also a lot of inertia against cutting senior benefits and usually the side of the argument that fits on a bumper sticker wins.

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Yeah, family is a massive component — one high-income earner, another low or average — and instantly shove you into social policy territory: incentivize marriage, make spouses economically dependent on one another etc etc. do the contributions follow the earner or the family unit in case or splitup?

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