This is liberal idealism divorced from reality. Reality says that we (the U.S.) already spend a third of our budget on social security and that's before the Baby Boomers start drawing from SS. SS is obviously not even enough to afford a shack in the SFBA now so you'd have to 3-4x the payments. Even if you doubled taxes we wouldn't be able to pay for what you're proposing (nevermind the massive market impact a huge number of elderly getting paid the median US salary by the government would have on rent prices).
Reminder that math still exists, and even if you taxed all of Jeff Bezos's $100B wealth you still wouldn't be able to pay for even a quarter of a single year of Social Security. The US government operates at a _staggering_ scale. And somehow you want to 3x Social Security?
You can't just tax and regulate your way out of people not being productive. The market _always_ wins in the end, even if it takes decades. See: European+Canadian brain drain due to high taxes and regulations, US college tuition and housing costs driven by government subsidized loans, the Soviet Union's trade deficits, mass withdrawal of kids to charter schools in areas where public schools suck, housing costs where minimum wage is high going up, CA Prop 13 skyrocketing housing prices, etc. In economics terms, no price floor and no price ceiling is perfect since there is always an imperfect substitute for what you're trying to regulate. Over the long term that destroys the effectiveness of any regulation attempt. The U.S. could regulate in the 60s because it was the dominant superpower and there was no substitute for U.S. labor. Now? China, India, and LatAm are rising fast and getting ever closer to being a good substitute.
lmao market always wins in the end. Guess thats why the market needed the backing of the worlds biggest military force to go fuck over their people in many countries.
I don't see Europe getting "fucked over" by the US military and they're definitely experiencing massive brain drain, been going on for over 20 years now.
We are humans. Old people should not have to suffer.