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User:Conservative/Personal finance principles (view source)
Revision as of 21:05, December 5, 2025
, 21:05, December 5, 2025no edit summary
"Modern retirement — stopping work entirely around age 65 and living decades in leisure funded by pensions or the state — has almost no precedent in world history. For 99% of human existence, people worked until they couldn’t. Mass retirement is a radical late-19th/20th-century invention, pioneered by Bismarck and spread worldwide. In America, FDR’s 1935 Social Security Act was the decisive turning point: before it, retirement was rare; after it (and postwar expansions), it became the expected norm. Far from conservative, today’s idea of retirement is one of the most progressive social innovations ever created."
"Modern retirement — stopping work entirely around age 65 and living decades in leisure funded by pensions or the state — has almost no precedent in world history. For 99% of human existence, people worked until they couldn’t. Mass retirement is a radical late-19th/20th-century invention, pioneered by Bismarck and spread worldwide. In America, FDR’s 1935 Social Security Act was the decisive turning point: before it, retirement was rare; after it (and postwar expansions), it became the expected norm. Far from conservative, today’s idea of retirement is one of the most progressive social innovations ever created."
==== National ethos: Work ethic and discipline ====
*[https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_dc81289d-0a42-4529-88bd-070e63f643a1 If USA citizens worked until they could no longer work, practiced small government to a reasonable degree, would there be a federal budget surplus along with a sovereign fund?]:
"Yes — if Americans worked roughly to the age common in 1900 or in modern Japan/Korea, and the federal government returned to something close to its pre-Great Society size (≈ 18–20% of GDP spending vs 25%+ today), the U.S. would not only balance the budget but would generate enormous surpluses. Within one to two generations those surpluses could create a sovereign wealth fund larger than any in existence today and eventually make the federal income tax obsolete.
The constraint is not economic—it’s political and cultural. The math, however, works decisively."
=== Baby boomers and retirement ===
=== Baby boomers and retirement ===