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Seventy year olds are fully capable of caring about the generations to come. Indeed, financially secure seventy year olds (which presumably describes the elderly in the political class) are among those best suited to think in generational terms. If they don't, that's a deep cultural problem, and electing younger folks may mitigate it but will not solve it.
Talking to the boomer/elderly people I know, the thing that outrages them the most is either when their stock portfolio goes down rapidly, or any talk of cuts to social security/medicare.
Those doesn’t really seem like benefits to the younger generation who needs to pay for gibs, besides the obvious “when you’re my age, you’re gonna need some good healthcare”
That has not been my experience with elderly people. Many are confused by the conditions on the ground, sincerely don’t know how expensive their benefits are(after all, they’re not paying for it), and think the stock market benefits everyone.
Others feel bad for young people due to the cost of housing these days, and although they won’t sell their paid off houses that’s because they need to live somewhere. I’ve said before that among my extended family in the ArkLaTex region old people with money are expected to spend it helping out younger relatives get started, either by co-signing loans or direct gifts(or occasionally through coresidence). But more generally, I don’t get the hate over boomer consumption because it is, generally, much lower than the consumption of working people who criticize them on the basis that their resources should be reallocated. Cruises are, on the scale of vacations, pretty cheap. Retirees aren’t DoorDashing much. And boomer housing wealth isn’t actually something they can do much about.
Their health care counts as consumption as much as those other items do.
It falls in the same category of ‘not something they can do much about’ as housing wealth.
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DoorDash is like something a communist would invent as a parody of capitalist decadence. A private taxi for my burrito? Give me a fucking break!
Now that you mention it, the poor doing gig work(I suspect because they can't pass a drug test to obtain more stable incomes) as the private taxi for burritos is so on the nose that I wonder why the numerous and extremely loud modern-day socialists aren't loudly pointing it out.
I mean, literally I have no mental model of more than occasional doordash orderers. It's just so much cheaper to either buy groceries or, uh, go out to eat the regular way, and doordash gives a worse product due to the food being cold. With modern prepared meals you don't even have to be good at cooking, you can buy microwaveable stuff at Aldi/Walmart/Kroger. I get that sometimes you want to order lots of food instead of leaving the house, but that niche was already filled by pizza, and I guess a third party delivery app for catering orders made sense but lots of people seem to be using it for individual meals.
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Yeah, when you realize something like half the federal budget goes to elderly people who had a whole lifetime to save up it's kind of black pilling.
Yup. A functioning society might instead give these sort of social payments to women aged 25-35, which renew for 10 years if you have 2+ children.
But instead we give it to the oldest generation, who also has the most wealth of any generation on average…
a functioning society would have women getting "social payments" on condition they behaved well and through their husbands as part of a family unit
a functioning society has no need for "young women" to get social payments at all and certainly not for having children which they would do naturally in a functional society
it's the dysfunctional ones which believe they have to support women who are already making horrible choices otherwise they go without shelter or starve; giving money to women, especially without conditions, would give them more choice which they would use to avoid family formation, break apart existing families, and avoid having children which has been well demonstrated by the last 80 or so years
the cultural institutions and expectations which coerced them into doing it anyway in 1950-1970 are now long gone and we see the results
it's far better the boomers burn wealth in an open pit than expand social payments to women
Ok then do “young married couples” payments, 25-35 yrs old + 10 years for 2+ kids.
No need to get all autistic-ragey about it…
All my peers are worried about financial pressure and difficulties with having kids. Falling birthrate is a problem, so do subsidies?
Don't drop personal insults like that.
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I'll feel less bad about Social Security if ever convinced the only alternative is UBI For Women and Single Mothers.
UBI for women or, God forbid, single mothers would crater family formation (even down from the abysmal levels now), spike divorces, and likely reduce fertility (especially for the women I would want to have more children)
I'm honestly puzzled why others on this board think this is a good idea. It would be far better for the boomers to burn money in open pits or pave half the wilderness with hospitals and retirement homes than to spend the money doing this.
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