Ryan Streeter
Yesterday I laid out the rationale for the Pledge By America.
The Pledge is based on the idea that we cannot tackle our deficit if we don’t tackle Medicare and Social Security, and we cannot tackle those programs if we aren’t prepared to change what we as ordinary Americans expect from them.
The Pledge consists of seven points. Today I’d like to focus on the first two.
- I pledge to do all I can to be self-sufficient, and to raise children - if I have them - to be self-sufficient.
- I pledge to work until 70 years old.
- I pledge to save more of my income than I do now, by a few percentage points a year, to prepare for the future.
- I pledge to allow a portion of my payroll taxes to be deposited into a savings account for my retirement, rather than relying only on Social Security.
- I pledge to be a cost-conscious consumer of insurance and health care when I am age 70 and older, and to use a fixed contribution from the government each year to get the insurance and care I need rather than expecting the government to pay for whatever costs I rack up.
- I pledge to live with less from the government in retirement and health benefits if I’m fortunate enough to be well-off when I retire.
- I pledge to give more to charity, my place of worship, or elsewhere in my community to address the needs of those around me.
The first two points focus on self-sufficiency and working longer.
Self-sufficiency. Milton Friedman's work could be summed up in an axiom: Don't let others do for you what you could do better yourself. The tragedy of the paternalism of the state is that it ultimately persuades citizens to be satisfied with services from the government that are worse than they could provide for themselves.
This is the argument behind welfare reform and education innovation. As citizens, we don't want to fight al Qaeda ourselves. We need the military for that. But we can provide for ourselves through work (even at minimum wage) better than we can earn by being on government welfare. Parents can, in general, educate their children better than state-funded schools, so they should at least be given the opportunity to do so.
Medicare and Social Security already create an entitlement for people regardless of their ability to pay. We transfer payroll taxes from the poor to pay for hip replacement surgery for wealthy 70 year olds. Obamacare makes things worse by creating a dependency class among the middle class.
Enough already. What have we become?
It's time to remember who we are. We are Americans. We don't LIKE the government doing for us what we can - through sweat, blood, and tears - do for ourselves.
Self-sufficiency should be a given. A goal for all Americans. And then our social safety net exists for those who don't quite make it, those who hit rough rapids.
We should all be aiming not just for self-sufficiency while we're working, but when we are older. That requires us to save and invest. The government has to do its part by cutting taxes and eliminating the regulations that make it hard for us to save.
But regardless, we need to be workers and savers - period.
Working longer. When the retirement age was set at 65, people weren't living much longer than 2 or 3 years past retirement.
Our current life expectancy in America is about 78 years. That means that we should really raise our retirement age to 75. But all we really need to do to balance our books is have people work until they are 70. So the news is actually pretty good! But that won't stop a good many people from thinking that 70 seems like too big an ask.
The fundamental question is this: why should we transfer income from younger workers to elderly people at much more generous rates than our forebears thought was just?
If we want to be an America that resembles the America our forbears founded, we need to reclaim their virtues. Self-sufficiency and provision for the future were a given for them, and need to a be a given for us once again.
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