There is nothing wrong with living off of your savings. After all it’s the money you earned so you don’t owe anyone anything for it, and you can spend it as you see fit.
The problem with retirement schemes today is that most people’s savings are not enough to pay for their retirement so the younger generations need to chip in.
“Savings” are just an abstraction - people can’t literally live off their savings - they trade their savings for labour, and the system is rigged so that those doing the labour have disproportionately little power to set the exchange rate, and the value of savings get juiced to benefit those holding them.
We could shuffle some numbers around with fiscal, monetary and labour policies in ways that would result in far more wealth flowing from the old to the young, rather than from the young to the old as is happening now, and it would still be true that “people earned their savings and can spend it how they see fit”.
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There is nothing wrong with living off of your savings. After all it’s the money you earned so you don’t owe anyone anything for it, and you can spend it as you see fit.
The problem with retirement schemes today is that most people’s savings are not enough to pay for their retirement so the younger generations need to chip in.
“Savings” are just an abstraction - people can’t literally live off their savings - they trade their savings for labour, and the system is rigged so that those doing the labour have disproportionately little power to set the exchange rate, and the value of savings get juiced to benefit those holding them.
We could shuffle some numbers around with fiscal, monetary and labour policies in ways that would result in far more wealth flowing from the old to the young, rather than from the young to the old as is happening now, and it would still be true that “people earned their savings and can spend it how they see fit”.
Well, they could be enough for retirement for a lot of people. That'll mean downsizing and reining in expectations, though.
As for the younger generations, they have even less wealth than those of retirement age. Why should they chip in?