Astral Codex Ten

Social Security

8 min read

Social Security

Article

Social Security is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between March 03, 2021 and February 11, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “government money from programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance”; “programs like … Social Security”; “we can entirely pay for any one of Defense, Social Security, or Medicare + Medicaid using land rents alone”. It most often appears alongside United States, China, France.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 7
  • Issue count: 7
  • First seen: March 03, 2021
  • Last seen: February 11, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For March
March 03, 2021 · Original source
10: The German equivalent of sovereign citizens think Germany is still legally a monarchy, so the natural next step was for one of them to claim the vacant throne. Meet King Peter I (warning: Bloomberg article, may be paywalled if you’ve already used up your free stories for the month). “His movement claims 3,100 members, its own currency, a bank, and social security”; his hobbies include black magic, hanging out at the abandoned factory he turned into a cult compound, and (of course) making YouTube videos. Also, taking a page from Martin Luther, he nailed a list of theses to the door of the Wittenberg church, “including ‘save the midwives’ (No. 20), ‘adhere to the cosmic order’ (No. 23), and ‘support free energy machines’ (No. 77)”
Inline links: Meet King Peter I
12: Does the Ayn Rand Institute think it’s immoral to accept your government stimulus check? (answer: no, “Ayn Rand wrote an article arguing that it is proper to take government money from programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance on the condition that the recipient “regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare-statism.”)
Inline links: think it’s immoral to accept your government stimulus check?
Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
May 04, 2021 · Original source
The post-WWII-but-pre-1970 economic world - the world of “embedded liberalism” - was a pleasant place. There were corporations, but they didn't do anything garish like compete with each other. Executive pay was taxed so heavily that nobody had much incentive to try to increase their profit margin; workforces were so heavily unionized that companies were nervous about any changes that might upset employees. As long as companies followed the script, the government embraced and protected them. Starting a new business was considered some bizarre act of alchemy, like discovering a new form of matter; normal people worked for the same giant company their whole life and got a nice gold watch as a reward when they retired. The government wasn't exactly socialist per se, but it kept starting and expanding programs like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, and every night you went to sleep knowing there would be probably be another uncontroversial, mostly-successful government welfare program tomorrow.
Does Georgism Work? Part 1: Is Land Really A Big Deal?
December 09, 2021 · Original source
Spoiler alert: Conservative estimates show that we can entirely pay for any one of Defense, Social Security, or Medicare + Medicaid using land rents alone. And optimistic estimates suggest that we're within striking distance of the Single Tax–replacing all labor and capital taxes with taxes on land rents (on the federal level, at least).
To put those amounts in context, in the 2019 federal budget, total spending was $4.4 trillion. We spent $676 billion on defense (15%), Social Security was $1 trillion (23%), and Medicare + Medicaid together were $1.05 trillion (24%). Let's compare those to our four individual estimates for annual land rent values:
Inline links: 2019 federal budget
Even the lowest estimate, the Federal Reserve method using a 5% cap rate, is enough to cover any one of Defense, Social Security, or Medicare + Medicaid, all by itself. And if you believe Smith's figure at the 8% cap rate, we could cover all three of those things and still have enough left over to cover a third of all other spending.
Your Book Review: The Outlier
July 08, 2022 · Original source
The next thing Carter tries to do is a little bit of everything. Since his campaign was mostly focused on his personality and outsider status, he doesn’t have a specific core promise to fulfill, and as a result, his time in office is a hodgepodge of different legislative priorities. Sounds like a recipe for complete gridlock, but amazingly, Carter gets a good chunk of his agenda through Congress. He deregulates the airline and trucking industries, establishes the Department of Energy, and teams up with Ralph Nader to implement vehicle safety regulations. He passes a sweeping civil service restructuring bill, reforms Social Security, and expands the Head Start program. Oh, and along the way he also legalizes craft brewing.
Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
December 31, 2025 · Original source
Specifically, I can remember around 2013 when there was a proposal that Social Security COLA adjustments (annual cost of living increases) be tied to Chained CPI, rather than CPI. And the AARP seemed very, very convinced that minor changes to how inflation was calculated would dramatically impact real people’s Social Security checks (1). I’ve seen calculations that chained CPI is 0.25-0.3% (5) lower than CPI. Which is small overall but large relative to overall inflation, roughly 2%, and compounding.
Highlights From The Comments On Boomers
January 06, 2026 · Original source
1: Top comments I especially want to highlight 2: Comments about housing policy 3: ...about culture 4: ...about social security technicalities 5: What are we even doing here? 6: Other comments
On the specifics of social security and why we might think Boomers have played things to their advantage (not bc they’re specifically evil but bc they have the political power to do so) -- the key thing is that they have prevented forward-thinking politicians from fixing the inevitable hole in social security that comes from our demographic pyramid. It would have been relatively painless to increase the rate or incidence of the social security payroll tax at any point in the past 25 years, the looming demographic cliff was obvious and the increased burden could’ve been shared more equally. Instead, they prevented reforms and all of the fiscal pain from demographic shifts will be borne by younger generations.
Then the immigrant haters decided we needed fewer workers in the country, or at least fewer paying SS taxes, so they slowed legal immigration and pushed illegals into the underground economy, so they don’t pay taxes to support social security. And social security is going to get whacked again, plus the evils the SS system was intended to alleviate -- people too old to work and too poor to live -- will return.
Political Backflow From Europe
February 11, 2026 · Original source
In my post on Baby Boomers, I argued against claims that America keeps raising taxes on the young so it can award larger pensions to the old (in fact, Social Security payouts per person have become less generous over time, not more - although total subsidies to the elderly are rising because of increasing longevity and health insurance costs). Several European readers wrote in to say that, whether or not this is happening in America, it definitely happens in Europe:
Inline links: my post on Baby Boomers