Money is just an information-carrying mechanism. A lot of people fetishize it because they see the immediate effect of "If I had money, I could buy things." Ultimately, though, the economy is built on goods and services: if nobody produces those goods and services, then nobody will be able to buy them. Giving everyone money doesn't change this, it just changes the measuring stick.
The same dynamic plays out with demographics and retirement. If you have a smaller fraction of the population producing things, then standards of living will necessarily fall (barring productivity increases), regardless of what sort of financial trickery you use to redistribute wealth. Social security, individual retirement accounts, pensions - it all doesn't matter. If you replace social security with investment-based IRAs, then you'll just see steadily rising asset prices as a demographic bulge goes through working age, and then steadily falling asset prices as that demographic bulge retires. The relevant factors are the fraction of the population working at any one time, and their productivity rates. If you can't change these, you can't change standard of living.
Money is just an information-carrying mechanism. A lot of people fetishize it because they see the immediate effect of "If I had money, I could buy things." Ultimately, though, the economy is built on goods and services: if nobody produces those goods and services, then nobody will be able to buy them. Giving everyone money doesn't change this, it just changes the measuring stick.
The same dynamic plays out with demographics and retirement. If you have a smaller fraction of the population producing things, then standards of living will necessarily fall (barring productivity increases), regardless of what sort of financial trickery you use to redistribute wealth. Social security, individual retirement accounts, pensions - it all doesn't matter. If you replace social security with investment-based IRAs, then you'll just see steadily rising asset prices as a demographic bulge goes through working age, and then steadily falling asset prices as that demographic bulge retires. The relevant factors are the fraction of the population working at any one time, and their productivity rates. If you can't change these, you can't change standard of living.