link to original reddit post by /u/Nikita_Crucis
I guess it's a bit of a rant so hopefully you'll pardon me for me venting. For context I live in a country that's been historically statist and it wasn't until a few years ago when I started studying about economics that I realized how messed up our government was. So in order to retire here you have to pay for 30 years forcefully out of your income a certain % of it for what you'd call retirement, or social security in the states I think.
To illustrate my point, my friend's mother has been working for like more than 30 years and has been paying retirement for like 28 years (which in this country is 15% of your income regardless of how much you earn), she's 60 yo and because she's missing 2 years for 30, the gov won't give her a retirement plan, nor will it give her all the taxes she paid for the past decades. She can't find a job due to her age and now she's stuck in a shitty situation. When confronted with this situation, statist will claim "well it's difficult, the system is broken worldwide" and I'm like no shit, the system is broken because it's a SCAM, you don't look at a ponzi scheme and think "oh golly gee, why isn't this working in favor of everyone?!"
My mother managed to get all the years necessary for retirement and what did the gov do? It pays her like 250usd a month. It would've been better if that money was never taken off her again. Not to mention all the people that leave the country, or those that unfortunately pass away without having a taste of their OWN money. Even worse, when you start working and paying against your own will, you have NO guarentees from the gov that they will pay you once you are 60yo and have 30years working, you could be a few days of to get a retirement plan and the gov says "yeah well, we know we asked for 30 years of taxes, but now people are living longer/society has changed/we're broke" and now demand 35 or even 40 years of work to retire.
And the people's response? "well but you see, the problem is that certain people aren't paying enough taxes aka big corporations or the big farmers" and I call that BS because you know what happened when my country got a lot of money due to commodities going up in the 2000's? THey increased government spending and hired like 25% more gov employees. When commodities went down we didn't stop spending and now we have a big deficit. It's proof that we don't need more money, we need less spending.