What are they talking about? We don’t have money for anything. How are we supposed to think about saving for our retirement?
We’re already too busy paying taxes to fund the boomers’ retirement, while they remain delusional about the world and think that everyone else just has to work harder.
Do not blame boomers, do not blame your parents for having lived through fairer times. The reason it is far more financially difficult to live now is because more and more money is being removed from the system by the owners of production. It is the plutocracy of the very few that has so impoverished society not your parents buying their own house when they were twenty five. You are being misdirected.
If they built their wealth through the exploitation of others or are refusing to allow society to progress, then yes, you can blame them.
There’s a large generational gap regarding views on basic things like response to climate change and social safety nets. I don’t think it’s more helpful to blame boomers than republicans, but it wouldn’t be incorrect to attribute a lack of progress to the will of a lot of people in the boomer generation.
I think when people blame boomers for the economy, it’s not about blaming them for buying a house, it’s about blaming them for creating or supporting the economic conditions in which no one else can.
Are you working for a corporation, are you paying taxes to the government, what have you personally done to bring about a more equitable redistribution of wealth and how effective have your actions been. You are an ordinary person, the same as the majority of the generation before you, they cannot be blamed for living their lives as easily as they could within the society they found themselves. The blame for the current financial predicament working people find themselves in lies in a very clear single cause and until large proportions of the population see this clearly nothing will be done. You blurring the dominant cause is actively hindering its betterment.
I have advocated for helping people, have voted for people who will work towards that aim, and spend time doing so regularly. Most people I know of my generation have done some or all of that. Most people I know of the boomer generation believe that “god helps those who help themselves”, vote for people who are taking away regulations on business and right of individuals, and spend their personal time advocating for things that personally enrich themselves rather than for the benefit of all people. Acting as though the actions of “ordinary people” have no bearing on the world in which we live is defeatist. If the issue is lack of regulation on business or lack of rights of workers then it makes sense to address a segment of the population that largely believes those things are not needed. Look at polls citing favorable views of capitalism vs socialism across generations. If we cannot acknowledge the fact that boomers as a generation are more hesitant than other generations regarding the changes that need to happen then what’s the point of talking about anything. We need to reach them and talk about how these issues affect them. If they are fighting tooth and nail against us then we will keep failing for longer.
Despite the things you have said you have done the distribution of wealth has become more polarised across your generation than before. Your children with good cause will blame you for their world as you blame the generations before you, in spite of your efforts to improve things. Possibly those before you recognised the way things were going and worked as hard as you to correct them but were as ineffective as you have been and for the same reasons. My point is you are on the Titanic blaming the weight of the other passengers for it sinking and not the iceberg.
You are not really addressing my point. I’m mentioning the fact that boomers are statistically less likely to support policies that help the situation and more likely to support policies that hurt the situation. You suggest that those before me had made efforts that are ineffective, but my point is that they statistically are working against me and my efforts.
I’m not blaming the weight of other passengers on the titanic because we are not passive participants in the world the way passengers were passive riders of the titanic. We are all able to affect change. I’m watching news reports of the titanic and advocating for life boat safety regulations and am upset that a bunch of other people are saying I’m making a mountain out of a molehill and there’s no real reason to have more lifeboats because “some people lived”.
Sure, plenty of people are at fault, but I can’t just be upset that the ship lobby has a chokehold on regulation if I’m actively looking at people standing next to me who refuse to hold them accountable.
I agree with your point of view. And I also want to mention that Gen Z have much less "voting power” than the boomers. Just because of the demographic. And I also agree with Miller that the corporation owners took the money, but if we would want to regulate that, we don’t have enough people to vote for it. There will be more boomers who would oppose. The same with the housing. At september 14, european civil initiative right-to-housing.eu will start collecting signatures to regulate rentals. And it will be much harder for gen Z to collect the signatures than it would be for boomers. I even spoke with millennials and they told me that they are against because they already bought a house and they dont wont to loose it value if the market would be regulated… So we even can not find cooperative generation to have equal number of votes = power, as boomes have now. And boomers with all that power just dont care - and this is why I blame them.
No! Boomers bad!
por que no los dos?
Taxes don’t go to boomers retirement.
Either they get social security that they paid into. Or they have retirement pensions or 401ks. IRAs. That they paid into.
Some of our taxes do go to Medicare/Medicaid, but I don’t have a problem with that.
Does social security really only come from their own payments? The US must be one of the few countries that does it like that then. Usually, current workers finance current retirees, rather than current workers financing future retirees (themselves). There’s an element of “has paid into it”, yes, but it’s quite obviously not the same money sitting in a bank account somewhere. It comes from a future national budget.
Doesn’t matter either way. Much like I don’t expect to retire because there won’t be enough taxpayers 40 years from now in my country, I doubt the US dollar will be worth enough for current young workers to retire on social security without major interest being earned on it. There won’t be enough actual productivity in the economy to support its value.
401k and other similar funds that invest in the stock market are also how old people profit off young people’s work. You know all those comments you see blaming BlackRock or Vanguard for everything wrong with the US economy? Well BlackRock and Vanguard manage all these funds, but they don’t actually own it all, mostly retail investors and different retirement accounts do. You could behead all the billionaires and it’ll improve things, but that’s mostly just idle wealth on paper since there’s like a thousand of them, versus millions of retirees constantly consuming things using money that earned interest by being invested in the economy (i.e profiting off younger people, as that’s just how capitalism works)
Capitalism or communism doesn’t matter in the medium term either, the only way a person can retire is to start living off the backs of others. It’s not an issue when a society is growing, but once it plateaus and eventually starts shrinking, it’s a problem. This could be changed once human labor is no longer necessary to provide everyone’s needs, assuming capitalists don’t get to keep ownership of everything.
Look at the US population pyramid in 1970
vs 1990
vs 2025
Ain’t no gen z going to be retiring at this rate. Or they’ll be the last generation to be able to do so without a major rework of society.
So yes, people are rightfully jealous that they have to pay upkeep on retirees when they themselves will likely never get to retire.
Yes social security in the U.S is a specific tax that only goes to social security. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work but lately there has been talk of using it for the war. Which shouldn’t be allowed.
I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone that billionaires hoarding wealth and capitalism greed has gotten us where we are.
It’s silly to blame older generations that had it better for the decline.
They have as much control over all of this as I do right now. Which is very little.
Profit and production per person has been increasing for as long as it’s been recorded. Yet wages have not came close to matching inflation.
Why is that? Did boomers as a group some how orchestrate a decline in wages?
No.
That’s thanks to corporations paying off politicians and making sure no laws would pass to force them to pay people a living wage. No laws would pass to restrict increases in college education. No laws would pass to keep rent affordable.
Didn’t matter who you voted for. There have been plenty of Dems and Republicans in control at various times in the last 50 years. And yet. No laws were passed to help the people. Only create tax loop holes for the rich.
(Or in your country, I’m sure there are many times the progressives and the conservatives have each had majority power to make laws)
Because the rich pay off the politicians.
These problems are not from boomers existing at a time before it got bad.
It’s true many billionaires are boomers but there are many that aren’t that are the richest. Bezos isn’t. Musk isn’t.
Yes social security in the U.S is a specific tax that only goes to social security.
Well, it seems that the US has one of the best systems for retirement in the world then.
It’s silly to blame older generations that had it better for the decline.
The total net worth of all billionaires in the US is actually a bit less than the total value of all 401ks alone, ignoring other forms of retirement and savings funds. When things are done “for the shareholders”, what makes you think that it’s only the billionaires? Retirement by definition benefits from the next generations being held down by low wages to benefit the corporations you’re invested in. Boomers, or at least the selfish ones, have a tendency to vote republican because their interests align with billionaires’ interests.
But both the net worth of billionaires and total value of 401ks pale in comparison to the total net worth of baby boomers in total.
In comparison, all billionaires put together are under 10 trillion, though they might be slightly over that number now since the last year or two have been WILD for economic growth. But then the boomer number is also ~85 trillion as of April this year and probably over 90 now since the S&P 500 has gone up plenty.
In a few decades it’ll be Gen X and then millennials. As a millennial I hope my generation doesn’t take the same hard right turn once we’re in charge of the economy, but that’s like 30-40 years from now and who knows how jaded millennials will have become by then. Luckily we won’t get as many decades in charge as the boomers have had.
Don’t get me wrong, we should still delete all billionaires, but I’m just saying that this doesn’t fix the whole issue of retirement being old people living off young people’s work. It’ll actually do fairly little because the scale is actually so much bigger.
Boomers got pensions, then killed them off and barely paid anything into social security while sucking it dry. They get to double/triple dip into retirement with pensions, SS and 401k as a cherry on top. Younger gens basically fund that while the SS collection age keeps getting higher. So we are saddled with 401ks because that means our future is tied to the market creating a financial incentive not to push back to hard on the system.
How did boomers stop pensions? Wasn’t it company owners who decided not to provide them anymore ?
Yeah corpos that were run by boomers who killed pensions to increase profits.
So that’s like 1 percent of the boomers.
Depends a lot on where you are. My grandmother gets 2€ for every euro they put into their pension payment. I get 0.85 for every euro, and I get that in 40 years. I am talking here about the national pension system, if I could avoid paying into it I would, as the only worse investment I can think of is buying a car. Or perhaps NFTs
I am fortunate, as I have had a decent career. Still I must assume that the only way I can retire is have some savings and live outside the city. And even that’s assuming the whole system doesn’t collapse before I retire.
To say nothing of the cascading environmental collapse making “saving for the future” futile because there is no future.
If there is a future, the only way it can exist is without capitalism which makes retirement savings doubly futile.
There’s us and them. We don’t have money for anything, but then America isn’t for us. It’s for them. We’re only here to fund their dreams of extorting us further.
And to train our AI replacements.
I work in Germany and earn around 3500ish€ brutto a month in a three shift system and after everything has been paid (tax, health, retirement fund) i get 2500ish€ which is then again subject to taxation for everything i buy.
House rent without electricity is 1200+€, with all the extra costs, 2 car insurance because me and my wife have different working hours, extra retirement fund payments for both of us and some other monthly payments that are just safety nets in Germany which get us up to around 2000€ a month and yes we could do without ADAC and other such things but like i said it’s a safety net just in case because having your car towed to the nearest workshop is fucking expensive and i also pay 400€ to my ex for child support also included in those 2000€.
Haven’t been on vacation in 3 years because wife was switching jobs, still driving a 2012 Dacia Sandero i bought in 2019, was planning to get something different but it just feels like a bad time to invest in anything.
Wanted to go on vacation last year and wife’s Renault Modus 2009 started dying 3000€ later she finally got rid of it, i insisted she should do it sooner but she wouldn’t listen, she was convinced it was cheaper to repair and got a Nissan Note 2014 which should be paid for completely in April.
My point is you can’t relax with the money you earn because you never know what is waiting around the corner, some unexpected expense will hit you when you least expect it.
That is true, and if you get burned out because of the lack of rest, you don’t have the space or money to recover. I know that nowadays it’s a difficult time for the EU, as it’s kind of surrounded by Russia, migrants, etc., but I think we should talk about our issues and try to solve them instead of finishing every conversation with: “Don’t buy a coffee and just work harder.”
Most would say “just get a mini job”, fuck that! i’m not going to work two jobs just to have a decent life, that should be if i decide to buy a expensive car and want to lighten the financial burden.
