Come on son, we worked hard and ruined the economy and the climate and the nature, now be a good boy and pay for our retirement.
Exactly this, it's not even the fucked up economy state that scares me the most, it's the state of ecology that may make the place uninhabited in the pretty near future 😢
Unsustainable system finally collapses under the weight of greedy spoiled generation when their children cannot compete with their parents enough to continue supporting said unsustainable system.
There fixed that shit.
Those fools need to get the fuck out of here with that nonsense!
Most boomers and whatever came right after boomers don't even have decent retirements.. That's what's sorta funny about all this. I know quite a few 60s and 70s yr olds that legit don't have enough to sustain their lifestyles and still have to work. The system failed LONG before Millennials showed up.
Many of them went their whole lives "not trusting the stock market" just to literally have no retirement. Much of it was lack of education and access to the stock market when they could have been investing, but then at the same time it is a pretty stupid fucking system of retirement when without notice you can lose 40% of value because some bankers fucked around.
The system sucked for them that's why they still have to work, but instead of trying to fix it, they just complain that it's their kids fault.
And even the ones that have a lot of assets to be considered well off have a problem. They're living in the only thing they own that's worth a significant amount of cash.
Property prices have completely fucked everyone. Just because somebody can barely afford to pay 50% of their wages every month for the next 40 years in order own their own house, it doesn't mean they should. It means they've got no choice because there isn't enough.
alternate phrasing: boomers stuffed all their money in their bank accounts instead of building a world their kids could afford to live in.
As always it's your fault that you weren't born into a rich family. If you want to get rich you have to be rich, it's not hard. Some of the dumbest members of our society manage it all the time.
While I can agree about their failures, "don't save it's bad for the consumer economy" can go to hell.
i'm not saying "don't put money into savings", i'm saying every now and then, people should make a decision that benefits the world as a whole rather than just their personal financial situation.
boomers didn't sacrifice their own spending to build their net worth, they sacrificed *public* spending to do it. and not just public spending, but things that are literally free. like, deciding nobody should ever be allowed to build more housing anywhere ever, because that makes their real estate investment go up.
You should be able to do a little of both.
Are you actually saying that saving instead of being in debt is a bad thing?
If they stuffed into bank accounts instead of real estate, stocks, and businesses, the played capitalism wrong.
Corrected headline: boomers voted in austerity assholes and now their kids have to pay for it with their money
Oops
I find it hard to wrap my head around the idea that spending more debt than every government before them every single time for decades is austerity. They spent more than all the money constantly. Some austerity would have actually helped but they didn't do that.
That's exactly the neoliberal agenda: austerity is spending less for workers and public services, and more to help companies so that growth can come back and make earth a paradise free of socialism.
Austerity has nothing to do with spending less. It's all about taking the money from the poor to give it to the rich.
My Y daughter is doing well, maybe it will be shitty for her to buy a house or condo but she can. My Z one, yeah, I'm helping her, paying stuff here and there like groceries, microwave, etc, she's in her own flat and all and is not too bad but still, rent is 40% of her earning. It's ok to help your kids.
I absolutely agree! It’s not a competition, we are all living in the same world with the same problems.
Families are at the centre of any society. Families function best when they help each other out. Parents are meant to sacrifice to help their children, just as their adult children should sacrifice later in life to help them.
Oh, I'm sorry, of course...it's OUR fault that we're broke!
According to Forbes? Of course is the fault of the impoverished they didn't take personal responsibility. Forbes is a magazine for persons with stock portfolios.
That's pretty much the main thesis used to justify capitalism. You have the money you deserve. If prosperity isn't merit-based, then capitalism would be a horrifying abuse of the underclasses.
Ummm yes. Do better.
Good, perhaps the boomers will recognize how impossible the current structure is to live under and actually pay attention to what they are voting for...
Who am I kidding, that's not going to happen 😭
A lot of people are in denial about the effects of policies they support.
Just look at the cost of housing. There's a ton of NIMBY homeowners who are deep in denial that zoning huge swaths of cities to be exclusively mcmansions could possibly cause house prices to be artificially high.
As a NIMBY guy...I'm going to protect my investment. There's plenty of affordable housing out there, it's just not 10 minutes walking distance from an urban center.
I can go pay 20k cash and live in a trailer across town if I need to.
Edit: If you want to do it that way, you can rent said trailer for a pittance. I'd suggest you do, you won't want to be there long.
Everyone wants low cost housing, no one actually wants to live in a low cost area.
No they'll just sit there continuing to pretend climate change isn't happening
A lot of them will recognize the problems, they just blame them on the wrong things.
This is organized gaslighting. Dont get caught up in it.
Times are though, gotta bring home the bread somehow. It's your duty to click on the article and rage share it so that the economy doesn't collapse..
I mean, despite the rampant bootlicking seen in that generation, boomers didn't create that system. They're victims of it as well, just victims that generally refuse to see it. My mom absolutely has been fucked over by capitalism, and has fucked herself over helping her kids. But she acknowledges why, and agitates for something better. My dad is a victim of this shitty system, too, but was so brainwashed by cold war propaganda that he can't see it most of the time. :/ tldr fuck the boomer politicians and brainwashers, try to help regular boomers realize they're just as much a victim of this shit as we are.
Lead poisoning really did a number on that generation. While I'm also angry that they were complacent in what's happened, as I refuse to be, it's like blaming a severely handicapped kid.
Did you know we found out to stop including lead in gas in 1976 because school kids were getting dumber and less empathetic?
The thing to remember is that they had to rely on trusted authorities in the news or government back then. They didn’t have easy access to primary sources or alternate viewpoints that we have now. That’s why all they can do is pick an authority figure and put all their trust in them. They literally do not know any other way. To them “research” is finding a talking head they like or who looks “trustworthy” and then believing everything they say. It was an age of authority and now we’re moving into an age of transparency and they’re not happy about it. They expected that they would get their turn to be the trusted head of the family and now all their kids and grandkids barely want to talk to them.
Wow, that's really eye opening in relation to my in-laws. You just put it all in perspective.
Another article that refers to millennials in third person because they have a target audience that will be dead in 10 years.
Then they go out of business.
Hmmmmm 10 years ? Probably not
No no. The system they built was great. The thing is, the system was changed by them, just in time to rob all the younger generations blind, then stood back and watched it happen, did nothing, and then they have the balls to blame us when we can't independently thrive in the system they stood by and allowed to be built.
It's cute, in a frustrating kind of way, that you think the system was either created that recently, or was ever meant to be anything but exploitative and oppressive and isn't working exactly as designed.
Oh, I know the roots of the system date pretty far back.
Fact is that boomers made good headway, they started unions, health and safety, human resources.... Stuff that was basically unheard of before that....
While health and safety still exists, most jobs no longer require significant health and safety protection. HR still very much exists, and also does very little for workers day to day.
Unions have all but been disbanded; if you work an office job, it's very unlikely that you have a union at all, and it's unlikely that any whispers of a union are happening.
As a result, most workers are getting shafted in salary and benefits, and on top of that companies are raising prices to inflate their profits even more than simply screwing their workers out of their salary, and you end up with trillions running companies, making hundreds of millions or billions of dollars a year....
This has been going on so long that the problem is completely out of hand.
So... If the boomers didn't give money to their children, what'd they do with it? Sit on it for 10 years, die, and then pass it to their children?
Articles like this are either missing the grand picture or they serve someone else's interest: Making boomers spend their money on leasing luxury apartments and other crap, so there'll be no inheritance. Leeches are the enemy of all generations.
Let's eat the rich. That'll pass the wealth around.
Child free gang wins again.
Time and money. What a savings.
Same here! Well time at least... Finally I see a benefit to being completely undesirable! Lol
Have the elites who tell us we "never want to work" thought about lowering the rent below $3k at times? Even below 2k? Because we can't work or do shit with no actual place to live.
We have a lot to be mad at property owners for right now. Their lobbying and bullshittery is part of why so many people have to go back into the office and have so few protections against it. If we're not pointlessly wasting time commuting to the office their properties won't be worth as much! Won't somebody think of the poor landlords?? 😔😔
But then they might have to work... Oh the humanity.
My parents spent most of their time getting drunk and trying to be 18 again. I wouldn't really call that a good setup for their kids.
Unfortunately, they fucked around for us to find out. I don't feel bad if they find out a little bit too.
Of course, we can't blame boomers for poor decisions or tell them to skip that avocado toast. Clearly they must continue to suck the remaining resources from life so that they have something to bring to the afterlife when they finally croak.
The whole avocado thing really betrays a failure in the thinking of the people behind it. Some places some times avocados are absurdly expensive. Other places and times they are as cheap as any other random vegetable. To not realise that requires having no awareness at all of the importance of seasonal and ideally local produce. If you want to budget competently you need to pay attention to what is good value near you and when. Not understanding that time and location affects the price of fresh perishable foods makes you entirely unqualified to condescendingly tell people they are budgeting their food shopping poorly. All they know is that they spend $10 an avocado so therefore anyone else buying them must be irresponsibly spending just as much.
reaping what one sows comes to mind
or the classic 'well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions!'
I have no savings for retirement. Every spare penny I invest in the success of my family, mostly my own kids. I don't need to go to Florida and hang out playing golf.
I've gotten tired of this whole "everyone from this generation thinks the same, acts the same, is poor/wealthy", etc bullshit. The coincidence of your birthday doesn't automatically identify you.
No. But we are all a combination of our biology plus our experiences. Bring born at the same time as someone means a significant portio of your experiences will be more similar than with someone born decades after you. The fact is that Zoomers went through a disruptive global pandemic either while still in education or leaving to start their careers. That experience will inform who each of those young people become. The way that this effects each individual Zoomer will vary but it will affect them and so it makes them a demographic of "people who's education or early work experiences were disrupted by a pandemic." Those people will on average be a little more similar to one another then people who didn't experience that. Generational identities are formed by all the millions of experiences, big and small, those people have in common with one another but not with other generations by merit of being born at a particular time. Just as Zoomers went through a pandemic at a crucial early point of their lives the Greatest Generation endured the great depression and world war 2 in the first half of their lives. There's absolutely no reasonable way to claim that living through world war 2 wouldn't inform your personality and behaviour on some level. And so, people from the Greatest Generation (who lived through World War 2) will, due to that experience and many others, will have things in common with one another that they do not share in common with Zoomers (who didn't live through World War 2.) Another huge example is that somewhere roughly alligned with the millennial generation we made the transition from people who grew up with constant easy access to the vast expanse of information and communication on the Internet and people who grew up before they'd ever heard of it. Those are hugely different experiences. They change the part of you that is due to your experiences. The other people who share those experiences will tend to have commonalities with you that people who didn't share those experiences don't have.
Wrong way to see it, yeah the boomers are rich but a lot of Gen X are broke as shit too. Kids cost money, and with the direction the economy is going, it is just the sad reality we face.
I am extremely thankful for the help my parents have given me, my dad was broke as hell for most of my childhood despite working his ass off, and this was pre-2009 recession, the recession made it worse and it is only recent he is starting to get a real foothold on finances.
What retirements? What savings?
I'm 50 so not a boomer but I have no retirement savings. Zero. I do have adult children still living at home though.
Does the $200 left in my savings account after paying hospital bills count?
Feeling so vindicated, Americans are massively becoming not just socialist, but outright communist
Not to be that guy... But Americans have always been partially socialist. That's the reason child labor is not supposed to be a thing, your work week isn't 60 - 80 hours long without overtime, you have things like vacation days, sick leave, agencies in charge of stamping out food and drug adulteration, OSHA codes for safe workplaces, a public school system, public libraries, banking regulations... And a very long list beyond that.
Do you think any of these things are naturally occuring under a capitalist system? These were the fights you can map to specific socialist movements of the past.
But who am I kidding anybody who unironically starts complaining about Communists is so far up McCarthy's ass all they can smell is grave rot.
Is that really socialist though?
A strong labour movement isn't necessarily socialist. In fact I do believe it kind of gets in the way of socialism as they make capitalism bearable for the well organised labour class. Socialism is when the labour class also own the means of production, and for now, mostly, that isn't the case in most developed countries.
Do you think any of these things are naturally occuring under a capitalist system?
Some of them did evolve, looking a bit differently. I mean soup kitchens, places for the poor to sleep (it didn't look nice, I'm thinking late XIX and early XX centuries), sick leaves and vacations were sort of traditionally fine, work weeks, while being unregulated, weren't necessarily longer than what we have, cause unregulated just means individual arrangement, and so on. Life of a factory worker surely sucked, yes.
It's just questionable whether this social progress and labor protection laws are the same.
I mean, there's that problem with socialists - they like to call anything good in human history socialist or proto-socialist (the extreme case is Soviet history books for children with their descriptions of what was Spartacus' rebellion or German peasant rebellions and so on).
Yep. Nick Hanauer's done activism including TED talks pointing how ethical capitalism has become impossible what with regulatory capture and stable longer-term business models failing to compete with exploitative short-term models... and that we proletariat aren't going to stand for our state of perpetual precarity for much longer.
exploitative short-term model
This is how the system eats itself and you get parasites like Carl Icahn.
It doesn't even matter if the proletariat decides they've had enough. If things don't change then we get dramatic vast-scale climate migration that breaks the existing system that drove it to happen in the first place. Ideally, we'd change those systems now so things don't get as bad as they could. But if we don't, those systems are about to blow themselves up either way.
^^^ How to say you don't know what communism is, or the history of it, without saying so
Honestly? Fuck "Fortune." I hope it will eventually be called "Bankrupt."
Can they drag a few others down with them?
BI?
Children cost, who would have thought.
"Fuck planting a tree, I'll never get to sit in its shade!"
what's the point of having kids if you're not gonna do anything for them the second they turn 18
Most boomer parents would kick their kids out at age 8 if they could. Children are like Christmas puppies to them.
1% of the U.S. population holds >31% of the country's wealth. Is it any wonder so many of the rest of us are broke?
The era of a strong economy was brought on by factors from WW2 and the weakening was brought on by 2-3x growth in world population.
More people fitting into the same cities means less space and more demand.
More people means more workers for jobs that pay even less because the competition is fiercer than ever.
More people means more percentage of resources going to surviving and less on luxuries.
We can give a small % of global population luxury. US QOL isn't sustainable on a global scale with the resources available in the world.
In my opinion, the whole population growth excuse is always an excuse and leads to dangerous results. The growth in population in Western countries has completely decimated since WW2. At this moment, only Africa is thought to have a positive growth number in the coming years. The population has grown, but the needs of almost the entire world have drastically increased. Leading to enormous growth in wealth and also productivity. That productivity has not been translated into less work, and the population increase has not translated into less work. Both of those things have translated into more wealth and more wealth inequality. Blaming the housing crisis/ financial crisis on too many people will only lead to racism, while the system keeps sucking everyone dry and making very few rich. There is plenty to go around, and the population growth is a story of the last century. We will reach our cap this century with all its effects to it.
I hope no one takes this the wrong way, because I fully support equality for all races and sexes, but there's also double the workforce now. Women entering the workforce and eventually gaining near, or sometimes even superior footing, means that there are twice as many people competing for the same jobs. A larger candidate pool means companies can pay less and it's harder to get a job for the individual.
All true, but neither of these parent posts address the fact these efficiencies we’re not passed onto the worker but hoarded at the top
If pay would of stayed near the slope of productivity gains in the US none of this would be a problem.
Every average worker from french fry cook to teacher to nurse to engineer should be paid double what they are if everything stayed in line. Or you at least increase the top tax rate to redistribute the money back to normal folks.
But the US has done none of these which leads us on the path to the most common reason nations fall. Excessive amounts of inequality….
Population means more labor and more consumption as well. For all of human history before thr industrial age, labor shortages were dire.
The problems that come with overpopulation are pollution and shortages of specific resources. No this is about unchecked capitalism focusing all the resources to a tiny elite class. Even more concentrated than the wealth in France, 1789.
So what you're saying is fifty percent of all life
Tbf, the boomers came of age in the 70s, so the economic system was well in decline by then.
Part of the problem is a secular cycle. The baby boom of the postwar period helped fuel a big economic expansion that helped people for a while, but eventually the power of individuals fall because there's so many people.
Most boomers didn't want their jobs to move to China. China is starting to experience the same secular cycle ironically.
Many millennials were the same age during the gfc. Are you to blame for that? Are you to blame for the debt expansion and money printing that have promised to destroy the next generation? Zoomers came of age during covid, are you to blame for covid policies that destroyed the economy?
You should maybe check the definition of the word secular.
You end up looking really silly when you say something like that.
What's retirement? -the adult children
Doesn't matter. We'll die before that age due to the earth becoming uninhabitable. -other adult children
I mean, is it really surprising that a generation full of Karens who have blamed other people their whole life for their problems are now blaming their posterity?
And here we are, blaming other people for their problem as well, and mostly just the other regular Joe whose only fault is to be born earlier
Late Gen X with a Gen Z kid here, not contributing nearly as much to my retirement as I should be because I'm supporting her through college (without loans). We inherited this shit and we're sacrificing ourselves for the sake of our kids. I don't know who's to blame, but we've been dealing with this shit our whole lives. Don't blame us; we're trying to help
Doing the same thing with my older son now. We are paying cash for his college so he doesn't start out under a mound of debt like we did. It took over 10 years for us to dig out from under that load and start building assets.
My wife is 45 and we didn't get her loans paid off until two years ago. And we only we were only able to do that because we sold our house at the absolute height of the COVID real estate market. She didn't even have post-grad; just a bachelor's
Have they not figured out yet that this whole capitalism thing is imploding on itself
It is, at least partially, an inevitable consequence of an educational system that, whether by design or by accident, makes social mobility really difficult. Accessing advanced education often requires financial or personal sacrifices that are harder to make for lower income parents and kids. This is also compounded with the fact that in many places there's a perception that if you want a really good job you will need to go through this advanced education.
I was in that situation myself, I was always told that I couldn't expect to get a really great job in IT unless I went to college, which was unfeasible for me both financially and in terms of my aptitudes as a student. But fortunately for me, I discovered that my country had a vocational education system that prioritized the quick transition from education to employment, and a mere year and a half later I had a decent job, six years later I am an engineer. Turns out it wasn't necessary to go through four years of extremely expensive, pointless hoops, I only needed a chance to prove myself in a professional environment. It only cost my family 800 euros in two payments, now we are doing well financially.
So yeah, maybe just maybe if there were more systems in place like that, we wouldn't be reading how more and more parents are having to sacrifice everything just to give their kids a chance at some sort of future, you know?
Idk maybe I'm rambling.
You've identified a part, and symptom, of the system. What is behind it is capitalism.
Our education systems are designed to make us complacent worker drones incapable of critical thinking. Our higher education systems are sold as a necessity for anyone who wants a slightly less crappy life, and ensure anyone who doesn't already come from money who wants to go down that path starts their life in deep debt, making them desperate and easier to exploit.
These are all features of the system there to ensure its own existence.
The system needs changing.
The goal should be overtime everything gets relatively cheaper and relatively better. Housing is the big exception.
Stop immigration as a mean of increasing population and keeping wages down.
In crease density in cities even if it means new taxes (LVT) or forced government buy outs.
Built new cities or high density suburbs with direct train links to the city centre.
Stop immigration as a mean of increasing population and keeping wages down.
Sure, it is immigration that is keeping the wages down... I have no idea which country you originate from, but immigration is probably necessary to keep your population balance in check. So they are not the reason that wages are down; that would be the few determining the wages and exploiting you and those immigrants together.
I don't believe immigration is necessary for a countries survival.
Maybe fore increasing GDP but not for sustaining high standard of living. There is plenty of fat in the system and a lot of it is taken up by lack of affordable housing. Which immigration does not help with.
It's basic supply and demand if there are less workers wages have to go up.
Pointing_spidermen.jpg
Haha. Good. Suck it.
Not your fault but "They built a terrible system" is wrong too. If your parents were congressmen or business owners, you might have a point, but the actual affect the average person has on the system is negligible. The rich and powerful were going to destroy it.
That's why it doesn't really matter who sits in the presidential chair, bad laws still get made, and only the absolute worst get repealed, because they all overall agree with the direction of the country, it consolidates their power when they get it. People think "Things will get better under Biden" should really have been saying "Things won't get as bad as fast." because that's more accurate.
It's a result of weak parenting.
It's a result of zoning laws and car dependent cities driving up housing costs and lack of socialized programs for basic needs like healthcare
Young men keep voting against their interest for liberals makes this part of their fault. Ask Canadians about it.
Its like where I live... senior individuals voting for a right-leaning political party that's actively harming the public services they rely on to survive - such as healthcare, public transport etc... then they complain that services are getting worse.
Make it make sense ugh 😭
The irony is that people think that giving the government more power and more money will solve their problems... weird that 100 years ago when taxes were miniscule and government funding was too small, people were rich compared to today, and a single income was enough to fund a whole family.
The period of time 100 years ago is referred to as "The Roaring 20s" and it led to the Great Depression. In the 1950s we had a top marginal tax rate of 90% and that period saw the largest and wealthiest middle class we've ever had.
Couple oversimplifications there. "Roaring Twenties" were fed by the nascent Federal Reserve ballooning the economy through the 20s and an inevitable contraction occurring at the end with a huge regulatory clampdown, expansion of the state and prolonged low interest rates/inflation into the 40s. The "top marginal tax rates" were essentially base rates and the effective rates paid were close to half that. A more meaningful metric is federal spending as % of GDP by year:
which, taking into consideration that the economy has been growing in the last 80 years, indicates that federal spending has been gradually increasing ever since. The spike in the 40s is of course the enormous WWII spending. It's also critical to take into advantage that the general state of technology/industrial infrastructure is light years ahead now than where it was at the beginning of the 20th century.
It's pretty universally known that the entire working class has basically been left behind by economic growth since the 60s/70s, while government spending has continually increased since then, and simultaneously, corporate profits have also kept pace with economic growth. Which really begs the more important question, what specific mechanisms in our economy are actually producing these outcomes. I feel like people spend a ton of time arguing about things they think will curb the effect instead of asking why it's happening in the first place.
Or in plain English: the system isn't producing equality of ownership, or equality of proceeds from production/labor - why not? How can we fix that without just piping half the economy through the government? That's the real question.
I don't think it is the way forward to lay blame on our elders, or to be disrespectful towards any generation other than our own. Some people are stupid, some are not. Stupity is not dependent on age. We all blunder through life and fuck up sometimes. Beeing smarter after the fact isn't that much of an achievement.
Counter-argument: Most of them keep doubling down.
Nah, they voted for this shit. We wouldn't have this problem if they didn't vote for Reagan.
Dude, I’m disrespectful to all generations. Respect is earned and while you should give the individual people the benefit of doubt, I have zero qualms about generalizing populations based on demographics. There are age groups that support shit that is destroying our country more than others. Recognizing that is important to understand the underlying causes for which to find the solutions that can then be applied to those individuals I spoke of.
No, but its your fault you're still a teenager.
Stuck in the carbonite again.
Grow the fuck up.
Millennials are between 25 and 40 years old now and you guys are still blaming "the system"?!
You guys ARE the system, at this point in time.
For fucks sakes, you should be well past the age of being in college and should have many years (nearing a couple of decades at this point in time for the older millennials) into the work force. You are also the single largest voting bloc, but you don't exercise that power so even though Boomers are now a smaller group, they out-vote you by a wide margin making them more important. You still haven't connected the dots that those who vote the most get the most attention from politicians?? There's a reason why the rec center has a broken AC, but the senior bus has those expensive, cushy seats.
If you are still blaming anyone for your failures in life, you should be blaming yourselves. If the world isn't the way you want, then get off your asses and be the change that you want to see. You are the largest generation, but you still act like a tiny minority group. Obama was in his mid 30s when he was elected to the Senate, and in his mid-to-late 40s when he was elected President. Yet as of 2 years ago, Millennials only represented about 6% of Congress. Are you expecting those seats to just be handed to you? Because that's not how it works. That's not how any of this works.
You guys are still acting like you're some powerless 16 years old and still need to beg your mom to borrow the car on Friday night. Hell, even older Zoomers are in their mid 20s at this point in time and have little excuse for their woes.
You sound more nieve than a preschooler. Another boomer aka elder todler trying to pretend their greed didn't destroy this country and the planet. Why don't you learn to read before you die instead of hoarding everything? Your dumbass generation made this country far too corrupt for voting to do shit at this point. The worse part is how fucking dumb most of you are.
The median age of voting House lawmakers is 57.9 years, down from 58.9 in the 117th Congress (2021-22), 58.0 in the 116th (2019-20) and 58.4 in the 115th (2017-18). The new Senate's median age, on the other hand, is 65.3 years, up from 64.8 in the 117th Congress, 63.6 in the 116th and 62.4 in the 115th.
