fatvegan

I reckon superannuation should be mandatory and set at 15% or 20% with no tax-deductions, but all the tax earned goes to funding the age pension for the generation that pays it. I don't really understand why the government should use subsidies to encourage people to leave their children a sustainable pension system. If what Ross Gittins claims about the cost of income tax forgone is true, then the current system isn't really increasing the sustainability of our pension system at all. In fact the system stores up large amounts of wealth in private accounts, that will only be used for benefit of a small number of people. The main problem is that my generation won't be able to generate enough wealth to keep both my generation and the next generation at a happy level of wealth (whatever level that is). If some of the wealth stored up in super accounts was spread around more thinly as an age pension then that problem would be less severe. We need to be saving as a society, not as individuals. The age pension is very low, but the majority of old people currently live on it.

I don't really think there is a problem at all. I wonder if the whole crisis has been invented to let the government give more wealth to rich people - who realistically would have saved for retirement anyway. It's all based on the old fallacy that any money given to the government disappears into a bottomless pit, which means that if we can achieve a little by depriving the government of a lot then it looks like a bargain. Stiglitz wrote and interesting paper on it. I would like to be more like that fellow. Indeed I would.