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Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
This money would presumably be saved now and inherited later or given to people of our generation as gifts, so its trickling down anyway. Besides, no matter how you slice it, it is their money. They earned it. If they want to use it to buy a gold wheelchair, hey, thats their gig. Its not public money.
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Careful, Regan is listening.
I agree - their wealth/savings/whatever is their money, and they should be able to spend it on whatever they wish. But they should not be able to claim financial support from the rest of us because they want to do something else with that money besides than support themselves (whether that something else is buy toys byond their means, blow it on coke & whores, or leave it to their children).
My parents will be able to leave me more money because they will receive (very nice) SS benefits instead of having to spend their own money. That is nice for me, but still pisses me off a lot in principle. Reforming SS along what I consider to be fair lines would harm me personally rather a lot. It says something about the extent of my outrage that I still think it should be so reformed.
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And pensions are not synonymous with wealth. many lower middle class folks have pensions.
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I usually think of "wealth" as "revenue producing capital assets." Having a lot of money, whatever the source, is being "rich." (I think this distinction in vocabulary may be more in my own mind than objective, but there it is.) People may have pensions and wealth, pensions that make them rich but not wealthy, pensions that just provide an adequate income, or pensions that don't. But whatever the source, if one has resources sufficient to make SS payments effectively a "lifestyle subsidy," it pisses me off. Basically, I'm of the opinion that if one can support oneself, whether the source is capital wealth, private pension income, earned income, or whatever, the G shouldn't be taking money earned by the rest of us to give it to you to subsidize either a ritzier lifestyle or wealth transfers to your offspring (though I don't think the G should be taking those, either, if you manage to create and/or preserve them). Not sure if that clears anything up, but there it is.
I believe I am relatively alone in drawing very clear distinctions between social class and economic class. Many "l-m-c" folks, pensions notwithstanding, earn a lot of money, not infrequently a lot more than "professionals" or people who are socially u-m-c. I know a manicurist with no HS diploma who made more than I did last year. In my opinion, one can be l-m-c and very rich indeed (even wealthy), and u-c but poor. I don't care what one's social class is, or the source of one's funds. If you have money, you shouldn't fucking get my money, too.
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All that said, I do agree with the premise that pensions are absurd. Why govt employees should get them early and with fantastic lifetime perks is beyond me. Pension obligations have totally fucked up a lot of companies. They're almost like CEO compensation - there's just no reason for so much of it.
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I am less pissed off about private pensions than I am about the public ones (very much including G employee pensions, but also SS). Lots of private companies fucked up bigtime promising big defined benefits, or running pension Ponzi schemes, just as they fucked up overpaying egomaniacs.* This is sad, but also their own damn fault. The G gives outrageous pensions because the bottomless well of our taxes fund them. That pisses me off because it's my money and there's fuck-all I can do about it (I can punish companies doing stupid things with my money by removing it and investing elsewhere).
I tend to disapprove, in principle, of most forms of government welfare, but if there is to be welfare it should bloody well go to the poor.
* eta: this is not related to ltl's point, which, as she points out, is not exactly the companies' fault. But it also gets into technicalities of private pension finance about which I know nothing at all.
