Worrying statistics about American's retirement future

It's also an observable fact in the statistics on US states' property tax rates and average house prices.

To a first approximation that's true, but the actual situation is more complicated. First, when land taxes are higher, landowners can't afford to keep land out of use: they will just lose money to the tax. So they do what they can to put the land to use in order to pay the tax. That means building more housing on residential land, renting out rooms in existing homes to obtain income, etc., increasing the housing supply and reducing its price.

Second, high land prices provoke higher-cost improvements. If you can buy a vacant lot for $10K, you might not mind living in a house you can build on it for $100K. But if you have to pay $500K for the same land parcel, you are not going to want to live on it in a house you can build for $100K. The high land price forces builders to build more expensive homes.

Third, the higher tax on land substitutes for other taxes, so the total after-taxes-and-land cost of living is lower. Giving less wealth to idle landowners in return for nothing inevitably means more wealth is available for everyone else in the community.

Of course justice is less favorable to those who have been accustomed to profiting from injustice. But the fact that the elderly have suffered under the lash of landowner privilege their whole lives, and may now, as homeowners, have earned a bit of respite, is not a reason to inflict the same injustice on all subsequent generations.

 

No. We've been over this already (in another thread). The correlation in the statistics is not so clear.
But I agree with you that theoretically, in terms of economics, it should be the case.

Let's please try not to get too far off topic. If you want to discuss a controversial issue in greater detail, it may be better for you to start a separate thread. (You can leave the link here)

I know everything comes back to economics, but you really should start separate threads for some of your economic ideas. I feel like a lot of times what you have to say ends up derailing these threads.

Debating the effect of property tax on prices, or the Fed's monetary policy, is really not so specific to the topic of old people having trouble retiring. I'm not saying these things can't be briefly mentioned, but debates about it really belong in some other thread.

 

The correlation is clear statistically, but not uniform or reliable in every case. For example, it matters if a state has more rural or urban population than the average.

 

But home prices did drop in the 2007-8-9 crash.

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That had nothing to do with property taxes or the kind of steady-state home pricing factors we have been talking about. It happened because of the positive feedback inherent in the debt money system: positive feedback on the way up inflated the bubble (removing Glass Steagal triggered it by removing the restraint on banks' money creation for real estate speculation), positive feedback on the way down caused the correction to become a crash. Now we have had the positive feedback on the way up again. The cycle will continue as long as the debt money system is in place.

 

Dr. Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Vulnerable Populations and Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), has observed an escalating rate of homelessness among older Americans.
In a 2020 journal article for the American Society on Aging, Kushel wrote that of all the homeless single adults in the early 1990s, 11% were aged 50 and older. By 2003, she says that percentage grew to 37%.
Now, the over-50 demographic represents half of the homeless single adults in the U.S. -- with no sign of their numbers slowing, leaving baby boomers (those aged 57 to 75) particularly vulnerable.
"Elderly homelessness has been rare within the contemporary homeless problem. We've always had very few people over 60 who’ve been homeless historically," Culhane from the University of Pennsylvania told PBS NewsHour.
But in recent years, Culhane says that has changed. Older Americans, he says, are "now arguably the fastest rising group."​

'Unconscionable': Baby boomers in America are becoming homeless at a rate 'not seen since the Great Depression' -- here's what's driving this terrible trend , by Serah Louis, Moneywise, March 14, 2023

 

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Yeah, well, elderly poor people used to be able to move in with their kids. Now that their kids are homeless....

 

Yeahright. NEWS FLASH: Our government without regard for party distinctions and differences which are cosmetic, is a capitalist government. Every administration MUST work to support, advance, and benefit capitalism. And capitalism dictates everything else as any economic system must.

You started out with concerns for Americans' retirement prospects. Now you're trying to pin those concerns on Democrats? The Republicans are all about Trump. They want him to be their candidate and stop the prosecutions. And what does Trump (and therefore the Republicans) want? Trump's plans for retired Americans is to cut S.S.!!!!! In fact, his plan would hasten and guarantee an early collapse of the system. How? Well the entire right-leaning population should know that he wants to cut payroll taxes. He wants to cut funding for S.S. and make it insolvent NOW.

Some people don't even know what "payroll taxes" are!! And they sure don't know that they fund their future S.S. But meanwhile the government (Republicans mainly by far!) has worked hard to persuade us all that S.S. won't be there when current workers retire, and that is supposed to cause workers to favor getting their taxes cut to make up for the constant inflation we've all endured forever as the gap between the top 1% and the bottom half grows to insane and unjustifiable proportions. YEAH! Stop payroll taxes!!! Right? How much time with that buy the top 1% to keep getting more of our money?

You say ....

Anyone old enough remembers back from 1960 to 1980 or so that our tax burden, while always being a subject for griping, was not causing poverty and people were getting by better than now. And since then the tax burden has been reduced and yet poverty and suffering and food insecurity and debt have all gotten worse for a major part of the population. Why? Inflation. In just the last 5 years food prices have risen an average of 9% per year if you average it out. I'm sure it didn't occur at a rate of 9% each and every year. It was much greater in some and less in others. But that means food prices increased a total of over 50% in those 5 years! A grocery bill costing $100 then costs $153.86 now! And what politician did anything about it? In fact, which one ever talked about it to inform us what was happening? None. Not a Republican, and not any Democrat.

Sure, wages are rising . . . -a little bit. But the subject was retirees. I'm one. Social Security does not compensate for this inflation. My pension is limited by contract to no more than 2% per year. My T-Bills are getting 5%. NOTHING is compensating for a 9% rate of inflation on the one thing that historically has been a relatively low-inflation commodity - FOOD.

So you and most others in the US have been duped. You have fallen for the propaganda that seeks to pit Republicans against Democrats, right against left, all for the purpose of concealing the real culprit (capitalism itself) and instead, giving you a goat to "scape". The government WANTS you to choose between Republicans and Democrats and get you arguing for your "team" to protect the real culprit, and you have fallen for it. When are you all going to wake up and stop falling for it????????????

 

Their kids may not be homeless, but the kids can scarcely afford housing themselves. Many times these kids are renting small apartments that do not have enough room or privacy to comfortably house an older parent together with them.

What more often is happening these days is the adult kids move in with the elderly parents and help take care of them and financially provide.
(This is of course assuming the elderly parents own a house)

 

Do you care to present any evidence that this is true?

The only reason I could foresee Trump making cuts to S.S. is that the S.S. program is not sustainable and is underfunded. Technically that wouldn't really be a "cut", or at least not a budget cut. The program, as it is, will simply not be able to keep paying out at current levels, if no extraneous action is taken.

There is an additional thread about this here: Possible fixes for the Social Security Program

 

But that was also during a period of economic expansion. (With the exception of a recession in the 1970s, which was caused by suddenly increasing oil prices and inflation from the Vietnam War)

 

So in other words, the Democrat's inflation is a way to make cuts to older people's pensions.

All that money had to come from somewhere. No free lunch in economics.

 

The unintended consequence (the retirement crises) is caused by the replacement of pensions with 401K and it has nothing to do with the left

 

LOL!!! YES! Look into the Republican's "Project 2025".

 

Is Trump connected to that in any way?
Is that even a mainstream Republican platform policy?

 

Actually, it is. For decades they've been pushing government retirement programs - which party brought us Social Security. During LBJ's time he pushed "The Great Society" - a bag of "look what we're giving you, get voting Democrat". He's removed to have said "If we cn pass this we'll have het "n-word" voting for us for a century".

 

I said 401K

 

Everything and everyone must be sacrificed on the altar of landowner greed, privilege, and parasitism. Japan showed us where that ends more than 30 years ago.