Of course you can, especially when you look at the public debt racked up by the generation that is now retiring. Now, there will likely be consequences come election time, but math is math. The current generation of retirees spent too much and did too little to cover the costs over their working lives.
> If that’s your preferred method of balancing budgets then expect no sympathy when your company cancels your RSUs
I don't have RSUs at my current job. A significant plurality, if not majority, of laborers today don't either. If you're making $50k doing clerical work, have no RSUs at the company, and the company is having to make all sorts of cuts to meet pension obligations, what do you care about equities and their effects on current retirees?
At the job that I had that did have RSUs, I got about $3k, pre-tax, for all of them when the company was acquired by Oracle after about four years of cancelling raises, downsizing, and restructuring. I would have been far better off if that time had been spent by management giving COLA raises, if nothing else, given that this coincided with the COVID housing price and consumer goods inflation trend.
RSUs only really matter if you get a metric crapload of them, whether over decades or as a part of your compensation package, and only executives get that kind of volume.
Of course you can. Pensions are a form of debt. If the state is bankrupt, it's reasonable to trim its creditors. Pensioners included. (The politically-savvy way to do this is probably to spin off the pension fund as its own entity and then default on bonds, which the pension fund would hold alongside others. Then leave it to the pensioners to figure out how they haircut themselves.)
by that logic, sure, as shareholders in Meta (or any public tech co), we absolutely don't want employing expensive human devs to fund their retirement.
.. see where this is going
No? Shareholders don't want expensive devs, they want the profits expensive devs happen to produce.
The tax base is mobile in a way expenses are not.
I'll speak to this personally. In April 2021 New York City raised its top tax rates. I'm only moderately wealthy, but that prompted my moving out of the state.
Same as universal healthcare, seems like you net benefit by removing these burdens from localities and businesses.
That's one option. Another is better distributing productive capital. Building public housing so its occupants wind up owning it, for instance.
But that's getting into top-down redistribution at the federal level, which isn't in the cards for now. Within the context of cities and states, pensions are no longer a good idea.