Noah Smith
speaker
437 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 24 Jul
Noah Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Slowly, you know, the debt burdens and tax burdens will go up and social security benefits will be cut.
And, you know, there'll be the slow trickle of making it harder for, you know,
just naturally harder for people to live because you have fewer workers supporting greater number of retirees.
People will have to do more uncompensated elder care.
People will have to pay more taxes to support elder care.
You'll see immigration become actually more contentious because on one side, you'll see people say, we need to bring in more immigrants for labor shortages.
on the other side you're going to see like immigrants will go up faster as a percent of population because we're not reproducing local people as fast and so that's going to freak people out more so you're going to see immigration become more contentious even than it already is uh so that's going to be difficult there's just all these these problems you get from a low a low tfr that trickle in slowly uh and subtly and you don't see them like like oh my god disaster
It's corrosive.
Yes, but I think it's less of an event than a trend.
It's going to happen slowly.
We already should have realized there's something very wrong with the pay-as-you-go method of Social Security because, as Paul Samuelson famously proved in his paper about dynamic inefficiency back in, I think, the 50s or early 60s, Social Security, a pay-as-you-go system like Social Security is efficient
you know, if and when you have a growing population.
When you have a very slowly growing population or shrinking population, in the long term, Social Security is dynamically inefficient.
you just, it has big economic problems.
And so that's hitting already.
That's hitting already.
And so we needed to shift to a fully funded system.
We can't now because expensive one-time shift.
And instead, we're going to have to have constant bruising political battles over benefit cuts and retirement age raises and lifting the cap on taxes and making the system more redistributionary and all these things.
We're going to have all these fights over.
Showing 341–360 of 437 · page 18 of 22
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