In the USA, Social Security is paid out upon retirement and scaled depending on how early or late you retired. A common misconception is that a worker is paying for his own retirement when SS is deducted from his taxes. Current workers are taxed to provide the benefits for current retirees. For a long time this provided the government with a surplus, but in the past few years it's been hit-or-miss.
I think the best thing to do in the USA is to get people to start saving again and eschew credit. Few people have anywhere near as much in savings and retirement funds to maintain their standard of living after retirement, and most Americans have almost nothing at all. Teach people about finances (especially about compounding interest) and show them how money can work for them instead of the other way around. We're living much longer past retirement and yet accumulating less in savings, and that's backwards.
I think the best thing to do in the USA is to get people to start saving again and eschew credit. Few people have anywhere near as much in savings and retirement funds to maintain their standard of living after retirement, and most Americans have almost nothing at all. Teach people about finances (especially about compounding interest) and show them how money can work for them instead of the other way around. We're living much longer past retirement and yet accumulating less in savings, and that's backwards.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
