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In reply to the discussion: You might have to work forever: The honest reality about Social Security and retirement [View all]strategery blunder
(4,225 posts)So he wants to spike labor force participation among the elderly. Great! Now let's find them (millions of them) jobs.
Now their grandkids can't get an entry-level job because there are no openings. Happened to me, I couldn't find anything even remotely approaching full time until I was 29 (and even that's two part time jobs). I had the luck of graduating college in 2007, just when the economy started to soften, and we all know it crashed a year later. People panicked, held on to their jobs, and I couldn't find an opening to get my foot in the door, anywhere, other than scoring the standardized exams that are presently numbing down public education, and even that was only seasonal work.
Oh, and people who suffer delayed entry into the workforce as I did tend to have depressed earnings all their lives, compared to people who enter the workforce during good economic times. As a rule of thumb, our formative experiences entering the job market leave us more risk-averse, less likely to leave a job for better opportunities elsewhere, and more likely to put up with bad bosses to keep what crumbs we have.
The author of that book proposes to create a whole generation of depressed wage earners out of the young so the old can work longer? Just what does he think is going to happen to SS payroll taxes when the extra competition for jobs depresses wages even further down?
To say nothing of automation replacing low-wage jobs, we're gonna need a national basic income or things are going to get REALLY nasty around the time I'm middle age...