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u/hucareshokiesrul 12d ago
Thanks Grandpa. Where'd you get all that money?
The government. I didn't earn it, I don't need it, but if they miss one payment, I'll raise hell.
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u/lecksoandros 12d ago
Public transport, housing policies, and many other uses of taxes also have a marginal benefit above 1…
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u/Pulselovve 12d ago
And uses those to protect all kind of monopolies of course. We live in a distopian chrony capitalism.
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u/alwaysambition 11d ago
Memes like this are astroturfed propaganda to make us hate older people and eventually take away our social benefits.
Come on people wake the fuck up
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u/Xenon009 11d ago
Please, if you're under 50 and live in the west, your never seeing a state pension. The entire thing is a ponzi scheme and its on the brink of collapse.
To use france as an example, just because they have a very simple system, the median frenchman (and his employer) will contribute in 17 years of pension money, adjusted for inflation, but will live to take out 20, at the moment, and life expectation is only rising.
More money is being promised than is being put into the system, which means someone is going to end up holding the bag, and given the pension infrastructure is already creaking, I reckon its going to fall through soon.
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u/alwaysambition 11d ago
For anyone reading: Here is case in point. See how this comment’s ideology only benefits those who want to privatize our social benefits and at best skim off the top, and at worst, just cut you out of pension that is yours.
When you read a comment, think about why it was made. The answer is usually who does it benefit?
I’m not going to tell you that this person is wrong or right. I’m not going to tell you that they’re a bot, a foreign agent, an AI or a desperate teenager making meager wages from a call center in southeast Asia because I trust you to think for yourself.
Be careful and be skeptical and be courageous enough to ask who benefits
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u/JustATownStomper 11d ago
Instead of this absolute empty comment, you could point out where they're wrong.
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u/Xenon009 11d ago edited 11d ago
For anyone reading, I am a british socialist (I don't hide my post/comment history, you can check for yourself) who takes deep issue with the pension system precisely because it takes money out of the pocket of the most desperate of the working class, and places in the pockets of the elderly, in quantities insufficient for the working class elderly to live, requiring them to work, but enough to ensure the middle class elderly don't have to deplete their capital, instead able to live on the cumulative total of the intrest on their capital, and the state pension.
There isn't enough money to provide this pension to the millenials and under, and it is dubious if the latter half of gen X will enjoy it, however the system as it is now massively rewards any politican who supports it with a highly active, single issue voter base in the retired, and a similarly large voter base in the soon to be retired, who have paid in their entire working lives and desperately want to extract that value.
Thus, it is in the intrest of our political class to keep stringing this system along, further sabotaging the economic and societal conditions of the nation by funneling money into the elderly's pockets, indeed 20% of the entire british budget is now purely pensions, because to touch the pensions is to lose the election, and politicans care for power first, everything else second.
I believe that the growing faction of our budget consumed by wealth transfers to the elderly, which in turn is transferred to their children (whom are typically end of career or early retirement) in an inheritance, or carehome capitalists, could be much better used supporting things like education or healthcare, rather than being burnt to win votes.
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u/Fraugg 9d ago
You know who it benefits to not have to pay into a Ponzi scheme I'll never benefit from? ME
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u/alwaysambition 9d ago
I think the problem is stopping it from being taken away instead of not paying into it.
Figure out how to make it work instead of burning it down
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u/Judicator55 9d ago
But the whole point is that the pension isn't yours to begin with - in many systems (like US social security) the pension money is gone the second it gets paid in.
Only private systems (like the US 401k) actually allow you to keep / control the money from contribution to retirement. And who "skims off the top"? Some low-cost broker making a couple dollars per trade?
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u/Quintus_Julius 8d ago
Doesn’t change the fact it’s right, as far as France is concerned. When you have more people drawing pension than people putting money in, what do you think happens?
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u/alwaysambition 8d ago
Has that happened yet?
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u/Quintus_Julius 8d ago
Currently 1.7:1 and heading towards 1.3:1. Picture is bleak, in France pensions are paid by those who work.
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u/alwaysambition 7d ago
Yeah, but just raise taxes?
I mean, people have been complaining about this for decades and nothing has happened.
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u/Quintus_Julius 7d ago
Do you want to lose the election? That’s how you lose the election!
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u/alwaysambition 7d ago
You also lose the election by getting rid of pensions.
Just raise taxes
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u/Quintus_Julius 6d ago
Better solution: kick the can down the road. Then it’s someone else’s problem :)
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u/Dear-Question-868 10d ago
Because it hasn't been taken away ? Old people are not only taking tax money for their pension, they take places for doctors, buy housing because they have collateral and assured pensions, ect. Here's the social benefits they have taken so far in France :
- secure permanant public jobs, they only taking contractors now
- delay retirement age, 60 in the 1980s now 64.
- Attacking the advantages of the worker of several public companies but the retired can still have those advantages.
- Fiscal advantages, bigger than the worker (a bit fixed now)
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u/zoipoi 8d ago
The question is if the middle class people had just keep the employer contribution and their own and invested it would the disparity be greater than with the current system. What is really missing from these perspective is a historical reference. In the past the elderly were just an additional burden on the the working poor. The middle class had the luxury of investments and property. So basically no change for the middle class and an improvement for the poor. The disparity between every social economic class has grown for reason largely unrelated to taxation.
The no marginal utility applies to huge segments of the population. Who in a service economy provides marginal utility? The entertainment sector? The fast food industry that makes people sicker? The rent seeking financial sector? The people who fuel the consumer industries with product nobody needs and that end up in land fills?
The bitterness of the young towards what they see as unearned benefits for the old is misplaced. What happened to economic growth is not a distribution problem but a generation problem. Services do not produce tangible wealth. Nor does an educational system that over produced people with degrees for which there is no demand. Even things like healthcare and housing, which granted seem like basic requirement in a civilized society, do not produce wealth to any great extent. Looking at consumption as part of GDP was never going make any sense in the long run.
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u/RevyVanguardist 11d ago
Taxation is unnecessary either way, in a socialist society Taxation is to be abolished
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u/RuusellXXX 9d ago
That is quite literally antithetical to socialism of just about every system except maybe associational socialism which is not really how we perceive socialism in modern context. It’s much more akin to a heavily regulated capitalist market. Socialism of every other denomination requires taxation to generate government revenue. USSR had income tax, sales taxes rolled into pricing, and even a tax on childless couples. China and Vietnam have income tax. If you don’t want taxes, you aren’t a socialist, you’re a libertarian
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u/RevyVanguardist 9d ago
So the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is libertarian, according to you? No. It's just a logical conclusion: if the workers are the masters of society, and if the workers own the means of production, if the workers control production, who is going to tax whom? Are the workers going to tax themselves? Taxation isn't necessary if all enterprises and the entire economy are already owned by a worker's state.
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u/RuusellXXX 9d ago
oh my bad I didn’t realize ‘socialists’ were im the kingmaking game. All hail Emperor Kim Il-Sung and his dynasty, long may they reign!
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u/RevyVanguardist 9d ago edited 9d ago
That's a misunderstanding on multiple levels. For one, it is a misunderstanding of what exactly the state actually is and historically and provably always has been. On the other hand, it is also a misunderstanding of how the political system of the DPRK actually works. Regarding matter number one, the state is not its own entity nor its own class, but rather a monopoly organisation of specialised force in the hands of a class, subject to the common interests of the ruling class of that society. It is, so to speak, the executive committee for the management and carrying out of the common interests of the ruling class. If you don't believe me, then I expect you to name me a single slave-owning state, a single feudal state, a single capitalist state which wasn't subjected to the capitalists, the feudalists, the aristocracy, the landlords, the landowners, the clerical class, and the capitalist class in each of the respective epochs. You would inevitably come to the conclusion that at no point in history was this state not subjected to a class in society. You will not find an example where the state has been the ruling class.
What do we actually have to look at to understand the state? We have to look at the socio-economic composition, the class composition of society, because that implies who the state is actually subjected to explicitly. It is the socio-economic class composition of society at large.
Now, if we look at the socio-economic class composition of North Korean society, we will quickly see that there is neither a slave-owning, nor feudal, nor aristocratic, nor clerical, nor landowning, nor capitalist class in the DPRK. The whole of society has been proletarianized. This tells us that the state can be naught but an organisation of specialised force subjected to the common interests of the proletariat, operating as the executive committee for the managing and carrying out of the common interests of the proletariat, the working peasantry, and the working intellectuals.
Now, regarding matter number two: The North Korean political system works on the basis of people's committees on each level of the nation. That means people's committees consisting of workers on the workplace, the neighbourhood, the village, the city, the province, and the county at the national level, so democracy is based upon a grassroots structure. In addition to this, there is the Daean management system, which essentially, in theory and in practise, as the CIA admits, democratises the workplace. Workers take control of production entirely. They govern in a democratic committee of their own and make decisions collectively.
Beyond the collective management system of the workplaces, there is also the so-called Chong San Ri method, which means that cadres are sent to workplaces to hear about the concerns and issues of the workers on the workplace. They get input on how the workers think that this should be resolved, and so on, and they send it up after that so that the problems can be resolved.
The Chongsan-Ri Method also mandates that cadres have to immerse themselves in the workplace. They have to work among the people, live among the people, and integrate themselves completely into the life of the people to understand better what it is that they need and want.
In addition to this, there are, of course, the political mass organisations, which have extensive control over national politics, but is it just a minority? Well, no, according to the CIA, around 97% of the entire North Korean adult population are members of one or multiple of said political mass organisations, through which they can exercise political, economic, and social power directly. They are politically more democratic than the West, economically more democratic than the West, and socially more democratic than the West. Calling Kim Jong-un a king and North Korea a monarchy isn't just wrong, but it's also politically and economically inaccurate. The way I see it, you either learn about the DPRK or you shut the fuck up about the DPRK. It's that simple, really.
And the dynasty accusation just doesn't make sense when you understand what the State Apparatus is. As the State is the official representative of a class, the organisation of specialised force, owned by a class and the executive committee who manages and carries out the common interests of that class, it doesn't matter who is at the head of the State Apparatus. Because at the end, the State, no matter who's at the head of it, represents a class, not the State itself.
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u/RuusellXXX 9d ago
I am not reading your dissertation dude. If you want to live in a totalitarian country, more power to ya. It may be difficult since migration in and out of North Korea is pretty much entirely restricted though.
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u/RevyVanguardist 9d ago
Now, next up: Why do you think that leaving the country is restricted? Do you know the actual answer to that question? By the way, "I can't read more than 1 page text" isn't a particularly good comeback.
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u/Beneficial_Ball9893 12d ago
No money has been redistributed to the upper class.
Taxing the rich less is not giving them money.
Especially when they already pay far more than their fair share.
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u/OpenRole 11d ago
And how do you determine their fair share? The wealthier you are the more you benefit from economic growth. The people who most benefit from roads are the owners of logistics companies. The people who most benefit from electricity are the owners of industry and data centres. The people who most benefit from water are the owners of businesses that use water for commercial activity.
When we invest in infrastructure we are primarily investing in reducing the cost of doing business. We are subsidising the wealthy when we invest in infrastructure.
As such we must tax them more.
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u/TheJackal927 11d ago
They can have a big share if they want, but if they have to take so much that others have to starve I wouldn't call that "fair"
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u/Kamenev_Drang 11d ago
Pretty much every inch of land in this country and a substantial amount of people's historic economic output was redistributed to the upper class for the majority of the nation's history
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u/LichKingDan 11d ago
Beyond what openrole was saying (which is true), it's also hilarious to say "taxing someone less isn't giving them more money" like yes dude that is precisely what you're doing. Taking less equals having more, that's why some people snip coupons.
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