The country’s aging population and low fertility rate jeopardizes the solvency of Social Security and the Medicare program, according to a new study by Brookings
The immigration crisis has become a recurring theme in social gatherings and political debates, and is the main issue of the U.S. presidential election. Amid this discussion, one certainty stands out: while it’s well known that migrants have a need to live in the United States, a study has highlighted that the country needs them too.
Twenty percent of U.S. workers were not born in the United States, and it is expected that in the near future more than seven million more migrants will be needed for the labor market. That’s according to a study by Brookings, which warns about how the higher-than-expected increase in pensioners following the Covid-19 pandemic will affect the U.S. economy.
As the baby boomer generation approaches age 80, two challenges are facing the U.S. economy: providing staff to care for the elderly and ensuring the solvency of Social Security and the Medicare program.
Why do they need immigrants? There are people here now who need jobs, they can do it.
If I hear “immigrants will accept lower wages” one more fucking time I’m going to lose it, that’s just an intentional creation of a lower class, it’s feudalistic and coercive. Same thing with farm labor. Pay a reasonable amount and local people will do it.
Because unemployment isn’t really that low. When we talk about “people here now who could use those jobs”, we’re usually talking about people in dead end jobs that could use a career job.
So great, pull them into our elder care system, give them a career level up…now their old jobs are still unfilled. And while we’re super shitty as a country towards entry level service workers, we also as a country really want those jobs to be filled. So we’d need to fill that gap in the employment pool somehow.
Maybe we shouldn’t have the idea of a dead end job in the first place. Almost all work should be valid and provide livable wages. There shouldn’t be a class of jobs “just for kids”. As if their time is less valuable anyways. This is a super late stage capitalist viewpoint.
A job can be well paid and still be considered “dead end”. Just means there’s no room for advancement or growth. Has nothing to do with capitalism or wages, really.
Only if constant growth and expansion of capital IE capitalism is your goal. If it’s a job you simply enjoy or people you enjoy working with Etc there may not be room for advancement. But why would you want to? Granted many people do not have that. They’re wage slaves for capitalists. Point is the whole concept of a dead-end job is inherently a capitalist thing. If a job takes care of your needs and is Pleasant enough. Who cares if there’s room for advancement.
You’re hearing what you want to hear. “Growth” is not financial growth. It’s not wages, I thought that was made clear in the end sentence. Growth is like personal growth or professional growth. Learning things. Becoming more. No stagnating.
But hey, if you’re happy in a “dead end” job more power to you. I wasn’t necessarily arguing against it. I was just trying to clarify that “dead end” does not refer (solely) to wages.
It also gets corporations of the hook and uses immigrants as a scapegoat. The argument shouldn’t be “immigrants will accept lower wages,” it should be “companies should be paying higher wages.” Even for immigrants.
Yes exactly, thank you.
Our whole capitalistic system is built around endless growth. That’s the reason population has to grow endlessly too.
Right! Long-term care sucks for a myriad of reasons - low pay, chronic short staffing, physical demand, dealing with combative demented patients, wiping asses all day. But if you PAY people enough, they will work it.
Increasing social security taxes would be very unpopular, increasing the age for retirement would be very unpopular. There’s no way to reduce the amount of money social security costs without pissing a lot of people off.
The obvious solution to the problem is to make more citizens out of people who want to work here and benefit from everything our taxes pay for. Even aside from how much they would be paid (which should be a fair honest wage) the taxes off the top would go up faster than social security costs as long as people kept coming in and costs stayed stagnant
How about a wealth tax for people with over $10 million dollars of assets
How about tripling the size of the IRS (or more) so that the government actually gets what it’s supposed to
How about cutting foreign defense spending
How about increasing the corporate tax rate even just a little bit
Or only paying social security to people who need it
Or getting rid of insanely wasteful farm subsidies
But yes, I think we actually agree, that people who come here need to be paid a fair wage. That was really my point. When people talk about immigration to fix labor shortages, they almost always mean minimum wage or thereabouts (or even lower like for farm workers).