How am I supposed to interpret these numbers? What does the number on the left signify?
I want to see a version of this chart that factors in productivity. It’s true that we have more retirees per worker, but each worker produces more now than they used to
People simultaneously think AI will lower the amount of jobs available and that there are too few workers. It makes no sense
And less jobs offer pensions and the pensioners are starting to die off as baby boomers hit their last years.
We can still tax billionaires out of existence, though!
This is true, but it actually wouldn’t really address this problem at all.
The issue here is production vs consumption is out of whack. Taking money from billionaires and pumping it into the consumption side doesn’t fix the imbalance. There would still be the same amount of production and the consumers would now have more money to buy the same amount of things, so the prices of stuff would just go up (or the value of money would go down, depends on how you want to look at it). So you would just create inflation with the type of wealth transfer you implied.
The trick is to take the billionaires money and put it to use producing things, not consuming things. There are tons of ways to do this such as investing in education, small business loans, scientific grants, and big infrastructure projects.
Another solution is to increase immigration to make up the production imbalance. Good luck getting that through todays political climate, but most economists would agree it would help alleviate the problem OP referenced.
The trick is to take the billionaires money and put it to use producing things, not consuming things. There are tons of ways to do this such as investing in education, small business loans, scientific grants, and big infrastructure projects. Absolutely! China has made great strides in tying production to actual needs.
Another solution is to increase immigration to make up the production imbalance. Good luck getting that through todays political climate, but most economists would agree it would help alleviate the problem OP referenced.
A healthy immigrant policy can compliment a healthy production policy.