Life is made to be lived, not for working.
We should increase taxes income by making everybody pay their fair share, and these include multinational corporations, and implement some sort of UBI. Where people can have a decent life without being forced to work if it is not a choice.
> Where people can have a decent life without being forced to work if it is not a choice.
Who will choose to work rather than get something for free?
I'll tell you: the same people who would pay taxes if it were not mandated by the threat of jail - that is, people who contribute to charity.
That is typically less than 1% of earnings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_charitabl...
I believe very few people will choose to work, and therefore "decent lives" for the masses can not be maintained with this little work.
Define fair share, it's not clear to me what that is.
That it is my opinion, and you can discard it.
But I believe that if we tax small business a certain amount, big corporations should pay, at the very least, the same amount.
Again, it is not a scientific argument, it is a political one, and honestly I don't want to be dragged in a technical discussion about taxation.
Of course emotions are involved. That isn't inherently bad.
Yes actually. And I definitely don't try to couch my political views in moral stupidity like "fairness" which you are not even capable of explaining.
>Of course emotions are involved. That isn't inherently bad.
Of course it's not inherently bad. It's definitely bad when you can't even explain your position coherently but feel strongly enough about it to get into heated arguments.
That doesn't mean we've slaves to our emotions, or must make irrational decisions based on our whims.
But it is a foolish thing to say you are 100% free of emotions in your views, especially when that incorrect view is wielded as a cudgel against opposing viewpoints (which we apparently aren't even "capable of explaining").
No it's not. You just make all these statements that are baseless. I can say my political beliefs are based on rationality because my political beliefs are simple.
I never said my views are free from emotion. I said my views are 100% based on reason. I vote in my direct self interest, my values are based on my self interest, my goals are to advance my self interest.
E.g. Is it in your self-interest, that people live in a system where 1/300 are toiling away till they can't, so a guy can sit on a rocket? Is it an incredibly simple answer?
The whole point of taxes is solidarity. If you don't understand basic principles of being civil then good luck in your life.
but too many financial hurdles in its way...
And the costs wouldn't really get lower, you just change the illness. If you are healthier, you live longer and your final illness most probably will be cancer. Expensive long te treatment. Obese people die faster and cheaper.
this means, in the current world, you get to fat-shame the obese people, have color coded id cards based on their BMI, have them off flights etc till they prove that they ran on their treadmill today...
The US could take a serious look at addressing massive over consumption - but the last serious take on that was the sugary drink ban in NYC and that turned into a "you'll pry my big gulp from my cold dead hands" affair pretty quickly. The US is in too deep celebrating the exploitation of the health of their populace to turn things around - but other countries might have a chance.
I think most workers would like to see 100% of these gains go to workers. I think most shareholders would like to see 100% of the gains go to them. I think it'd be fair to share these evenly - and so higher taxes could make it so that the non-workers and retirees get some of the benefits of productivity increases.
“The normal retirement age of men will increase in 20 out of 36 OECD countries by an average of 3.5 years based on current legislation. The highest increase is projected for Turkey, from 51 currently to 62 years. Assuming that legislated life expectancy links are applied, also Denmark, from 65 to 74 years, and Estonia, from 63.3 to 71 years, will rapidly raise the retirement age.“
You can bet that some parts of life even became more unhealthy. I don't expect to live longer than my grandparents that were children in WW2.
Can't they just reduce the tax we pay and instead state that everyone is responsible for their own pensions, so if you save up enough you don't have to work longer...
Because you cannot expect all of the population to individually make wise financial decisions spanning multiple decades well past the years they can even generate income if they wanted. A lot of people already have problems budgeting for next month.
Because spreading out the "risk" of living much longer than you anticipated prevents destitute 95 year olds.
Also, on the more utopic/hippy views, it is just nice to help others, so why not institutionalize/codify helping others.
It is worth noting that if your goal is just to handle the people who didn't make wise decisions when young, the current system does more than needed, and there's a much better way to accomplish that. You can simply force people to save n% in a retirement savings account, managed by the government; ie. take the current system, but keep everyone's money separate rather than merging it into a common pool. This is how Singapore's Central Provident Fund works.
The current system really solves 2 problems: people who choose not to save enough, and people who didn't earn enough to save enough. You can solve the 2 separately: the first with the solution mentioned above, and the second with something like a negative income tax.
Now, the problem with separating the 2 is that there may not be enough political will for the second system, because it makes it obvious that the amount you receive in retirement is not in proportion with what you contributed. That's the case now too, but it's obscured by the structure of the program.
Life is about happiness - it isn't about work.
How many 60+ people do you know? Do you honestly think they should still be working?
It's not clear that retirement is particularly healthy, longevity wise.
You're essentially saying that not working may not be healthy. That's one of the strangest things I've read today.
You may not view it as "not particularly healthy" because of the frame of reference, not because of "a fact" that not working is unhealthy.
If people "retired" at the age of 25, could you reasonably argue that we'd have an unhealthy population?
But it is true. An internal study at a megacorp I worked at showed that people who didn't retire ended up living longer.
It makes a ton of sense. Intellectual work keeps your mind stimulated and your body moving. Inaction ends up killing old people.
Not all activity has to be done in the service of providing value to a corporation. You can retire and take up fishing or rock climbing, play chess, write a book.
This idea that we've been conditioned to, that the only valid life is the life we trade for money, is insidious.
Nobody argues with this. But thinking that paid work is the only source of mind stimulation and body movement is just silly.
that generation tied a lot of value to the ability to work.
the current generation looks for all possibilities to not work.
A person who is a Uber driver and a dog sitter is unable to display much skill addition after years on these jobs.
i can only quote anecdotal data about the attitude to work among generations. On the other hand, because of the changing nature of the work, it is completely understandable.
You're getting downvoted for this statement, which is utterly ridiculous.
From what I see around me, the current generations work as much, if not way more, than previous generations (such as boomers).
it is also true that if a generation is chronically overworked, they will not be interested at all in working till their death.
Both of these people are in their 60s and have earned their retirement - we need not extract any more "productivity" from them. Leave them be.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2021/january/refuting-...
My parents are in their mid-60s. They are both full of energy, in great health, and very productive. As a teacher he's not allowed to work past 65, even when the classes he teaches have no suitable replacements.
We should differentiate between blue-collar and white-collar work in retirement age. I would never wish someone who's worked in a factory or doing manual labor to keep on working. But if you've been sitting in an air-conditioned office all your life there's still plenty to go.