Comment on This is a shitpost
Rhaedas@fedia.io 1 week agoThe last part is exactly what they want you to think. It WAS meant to be sufficient, but that would have cost someone else, so they invented the idea of people taking care of themselves with the 401K invention. Now when your SS doesn't mean your needs, they can point and say, well, you should have saved up better.
There used to be company pensions too, but they've slowly eroded away as younger people entered their jobs. My job gave me the option years ago of keeping the pension going or converting it to a secondary 401k that would earn lots of money, promise. I said hell no, give me my pension.
folekaule@lemmy.world 1 week ago
But isn’t thay the reality now? Even though it wasn’t meant that way, it has been changed over the years. I’m genuinely curious. I’m not saying it should be that way, just that my understanding of how it works was that you can’t expect to get your deductions back.
Rhaedas@fedia.io 1 week ago
It's not a matter of getting back what you put in, but to be able to not worry about supporting your basic needs in the last part of life. That many have paid into the system their entire working life and it isn't enough without some extra supplement suggests it's not working well enough.
folekaule@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Ok, I see what you’re saying now. Yes, 100%, we should take care of everyone’s basic needs as a society and that’s far from working. I think where my (in retrospect, very poorly worded) original post came from is that people think that is works like a bank and that the intent is that you just withdraw it later like tax-free savings and then are surprised to learn that the math includes accounting for people dying off before they can collect benefits. I think people should know that they are paying into a pool and by design “their money” is being paid out to other people, and that it is on the whole a good thing.