The author was addressing the opposite situation -- people using more than what they pay for.
> It would be just as ridiculous to write an article about how "people with children in schools aren't paying the cost of the school"
A more similar analogy to what the author was pointing out would be that current taxpayers will receive more Social Security benefit over their lifetimes than the future value of their lifetime payments, meaning that the system is only financially sound if we assume the working population will grow at an appropriate rate such that we'll always have enough workers to pay for retirees.
Or, adjusting the analogies you provided: we are borrowing from other countries to pay for our schools and fire departments. This happens to be true. Is it bad? Unknown.
Not the working population, simply the tax revenue.
You could theoretically have one robot producing trillions of $ and tax that one robot and pay for everything.
That's one of the reasons why everyone's obsessed with growth, if the economy grows, the tax budget goes up without tax rates going up so the country can afford to pay for more stuff.
Good point. That's why it's likely the youth and the not-yet-born will pay a higher percent of their lifetime incomes in taxes while probably receiving less benefit. Americans have a history of voting wealth transfers to themselves from their grandchildren.
The author was addressing the opposite situation -- people using more than what they pay for.
> It would be just as ridiculous to write an article about how "people with children in schools aren't paying the cost of the school"
A more similar analogy to what the author was pointing out would be that current taxpayers will receive more Social Security benefit over their lifetimes than the future value of their lifetime payments, meaning that the system is only financially sound if we assume the working population will grow at an appropriate rate such that we'll always have enough workers to pay for retirees.
Or, adjusting the analogies you provided: we are borrowing from other countries to pay for our schools and fire departments. This happens to be true. Is it bad? Unknown.