Thread: Any work is good work

Originally Posted by pixelfixed

You get hungry enough, you will work for whatever it takes to feed your family.

True that, but you ever wonder if somebody isn't creating an economic environment to take advantage of that? Whatever happened to being able to find a job that wasn't a take it or leave it proposition because we have a million others willing to do it for even less.

To me "good work" implies being able to find the sort of work to support your family at a level above a bare subsistence standard of living. I am not talking luxury living but merely comfortable.

Bob

Originally Posted by pixelfixed

Tottaly untrue,my stats are for people that started drawing SS 20+ yrs ago.the elderly.

My Dad is 98 and started drawing in 1978 or so. He gets $1200 or so a month. SS is indexed to inflation and goes up every year (mostly). Average increases have been around 3-5% a year. Only the last few years have they stagnated.

if you check the stats from SS itself the average check regardless of when the draw started is $1200. I believe the max you can get is around $1600 or so but that's just a guess.

When my dad started drawing it was of course way lower. Around the figure you quote but it has risen.

Originally Posted by thebigspendur

My Dad is 98 and started drawing in 1978 or so. He gets $1200 or so a month. SS is indexed to inflation and goes up every year (mostly). Average increases have been around 3-5% a year. Only the last few years have they stagnated.

if you check the stats from SS itself the average check regardless of when the draw started is $1200. I believe the max you can get is around $1600 or so but that's just a guess.

When my dad started drawing it was of course way lower. Around the figure you quote but it has risen.

Our COLA has been less than 1.5% for the past 3 yrs, your dad probebly paid 100K into the system.I am fortunate in that I get about twice what your dad gets less medicare,but I paid 203K into SS since i was 13 yrs old, I get zero interest on the forced investment.
If I died tomorrow, my wife gets none of it.except a $250 death benifit.

Why does your wife get none of it? Under SS rules she can get either her own if she worked or yours, whichever is larger. Forced investment? It's not an investment it's social insurance. I worked for the Fed and paid nothing into SS and don't get it. I had a 401K and it was doing fine until 3 years before my retirement when it lost half of it's value along with a lot of other folks. You don't have that issue with SS. So maybe you're lucky and you come out ahead with investments over SS and maybe you're in big trouble and have to work till you're dying day. Your choice.

Originally Posted by Wayne1963

As to the title of this thread, "Any work is good work", I disagree, the decline of American wages has been horrific for the last 40 years. The American middle class worker is making about what they made in the 80s.

If the answer is having more manufacturing returning to North America in order to build the middle class then reduced wages as well as reduced profit margins will have to happen. Otherwise no one will be able to afford what's made here. Just a basic fact of economics.

I still don't know whether that old lady worked because she had to or because she wanted to. The second part I think almost everybody would agree that a lot of sense of fulfillment can be derived from just the act of working regardless of the wage (e.g. volunteering).

As far as the first part it's not all that complicated if you look at the fundamentals. Social security does not have to be a pyramid scheme. As long as on average people get back what they put in it is sustainable (there are details about cost of living and inflation but those are technicalities that are simple math). It boils down to - the current retirees get what the current workers put in. It seems pretty fair too - what people get is tied to the current economic conditions, so their retirement is not tied to what a cup of coffee or a loaf of bread cost 50 years ago when they contributed. It's a simple social contract - no need for the pathos about those past generations, how they made the country what it is, what they had to live through, what they had to sacrifice - just make sure something cross-generational as retirement scheme works. Because that's just the nature of things - if it doesn't work on a country level it has to work on family level, i.e. children will still have to care for their parents when those stop working.

The problem is when on average people get more than what is put in, then the difference has to come from somewhere. The solution is obvious and simple - scale back what people get in retirement. They get more either because they live longer than expected, or because they were promised more than they should've been promised. So, raise the age before they can draw benefits (because they now live longer), and scale back what was promised.
The problem is entirely political - those who get retirement benefits vote the most and have by far the strongest lobby, so the politicians elected as a result continue to perpetuate this unsustainable state. Eventually this will have to be addressed, when it grows to be too big of a problem to ignore, and the result will be far worse then than if it is addressed sooner.

But everybody is selfish - retirees think they may be dead by then, or in a too bad shape to know what's happening to them; politicians' highest priority is their current job. And so this is just how it is going to be.
The only way out is if the economy grows enough to support those high benefits (for sustainability you need the current contributions to equal to the current payments). But, that is not likely to happen either with the US economic structure - it prioritizes capital over labor, the capital is highly concentrated among very few people, so the profits don't contribute much to the social security fund.
Alternatively young people would smart up and start voting in larger fraction for their interest, that could solve the political issue and make sure what needs to be done gets done.

I've lived in Germany for a while - the way they run things would be characterized in USA as 'pure socialism'. It's far more egalitarian society too. I don't think they work harder than americans.

Originally Posted by Brenngun

If the answer is having more manufacturing returning to North America in order to build the middle class then reduced wages as well as reduced profit margins will have to happen. Otherwise no one will be able to afford what's made here. Just a basic fact of economics.

Not really, the companies made profits before at the wages and benefits levels then and the people could afford to pay the higher prices of the goods made and sold here. Free trade only works on a level playing field where participating countries have similar standards of living. In the global economy there are too many vastly different standards of living for that to work well.

In the end countries with a relatively high standard of living suffer a decrease and countries with a lower standard gain an increase in theirs but the gap between the two still remains large. Profits do increase though.

Bob

I do whine and moan about my job a bit due to all the BS that is there that doesn't have to be...but I am thankful that I do have it. I got into the railroad industry about 8 years ago. Many think that if you are a railroader you make a lot of $, think again. If there was a middle income bracket, I would be sitting at the very bottom of it...most likely at the mid to upper end of low income. What railroading does have going for it is that it is relatively stable even in todays job market & so far railroad retirement has been kept from the politicians. The hours are terrible as you don't know when you are going to work...but it's a job. I can think about better things & much worse things to do...

Originally Posted by BobH

Not really, the companies made profits before at the wages and benefits levels then and the people could afford to pay the higher prices of the goods made and sold here. Free trade only works on a level playing field where participating countries have similar standards of living. In the global economy there are too many vastly different standards of living for that to work well.

In the end countries with a relatively high standard of living suffer a decrease and countries with a lower standard gain an increase in theirs but the gap between the two still remains large. Profits do increase though.

Bob

Outfits only care about the bottom line. Employees are a necessary inconvenient drag so wherever the cheapest source of labor ie they will go. A textbook case is the Mattel Toy Co. originally they were located in N.Y where they had to deal with unions and high taxes and high overhead overall. However they were a very profitable company. In the 1980s as I recall they sold the land the company was on and moved lock, stock and barrel to El Paso, Texas where there were no Unions and lower taxes and other costs. I don't recall the prices of their toys dropping one cent. They were one of the largest employers in town. After the free trade agreement passed they picked up and moved to Juarez, Mexico. The folks in El Paso could see the factory across the Rio Grande. In Juarez land was practically free and there were no regulations of any kind. They could do as they please except for the bribes of course. Funny I don't recall their toy prices being reduced. Of course their profits sure went up as did the unemployment rate in El Paso which never recovered from that.

Back in the 80s our Govt caved in to industry and drank the kool aid and believed the fairy tale stories business told them how allowing them to move off shore would benefit the economy here. It benefited the bottom line alright and what we have now is because of policies started then.

As far as Social security is concerned it's problems are easy to solve. People simply pay more. When you take out private insurance as costs go up you either pay more or get less. Why is SS any different?

TBS

Many years ago my wife and I had breakfast with an American couple while on holiday. It was at a time when the Canada/US free trade deal had been in effect for a bit and it had just been widened to include Mexico. The fella asked me what I thought of free trade. I told him I thought we got it up the back side when we signed with the US because many manufacturing jobs headed south to of all areas, states that were non union and unions were seen as being communist. I also told him that it would now be their turn to get it up the back side as Mexico was now on board too. He worked in the publishing industry in the US and allowed that it was already happening. Turns out he knew of a plant being built in Texas and complete except for the machinery. The machinery intended for that new Texas plant went right on by into Mexico for use there. I know exactly how that works and why. Yea, nothing happens overnight and everyone is riled now and wants to close the barn door after the horses are all gone. Kool aid for sure.

Baby steps first with regional free trade zones like Canada/US or the EU, then slowly expand those free trade zones to include more countries and finally tie them into a world wide network called the Global Economy. Yea, we've been had and then some.

Bob