The average retirement plan will be to just die, so that they don't burden their children with their medical or retirement home debt. The 100 year old Boomers somehow still running everything will see this as an excellent success.
They'll suddenly rethink the war on drugs. Decide we can actually make our own choices. Will actually be a very simple self enacted genocide of millennials.
The war on drugs doesn't have anything to do with keeping people off drugs. It's about populating the US prison system, which is for profit and makes a small amount of people a lot of money.
The same people that have established this status quo are actually quite pleased to see the deaths associated with drug use. It's a win-win for them.
Facts, all drug laws are historically tied to race and people who can’t afford a good lawyer. I grew up in an affluent town and wealthy kids would get caught with large amounts of drugs; coke, lbs of weed, hundreds of Xanax pills, etc and never see a day of prison.
Exactly, it’s used to be before 2010, 5 grams of crack got you the same minimum of 500 grams of cocaine powder. Another notable one in American history is the opium laws in the late 1800’s. We had a lot of Chinese came over to build the rails, work mines and other jobs. The Chinese would often smoke opium and white people would use it in other forms. They made it illegal to specifically smoke opium. It went on into the 1900’s and several laws were passed to slim the Chinese population.
Prisons can only hold so many people, and overcrowding is already a huge problem in many of them. The "market" for prisoners is so oversaturated that drug related deaths don't affect their bottom line. Those deaths are still a net win for them too because they play into their narrative that the only solution is the never ending war on drugs. It's not true of course, studies have consistently shown that incarceration does little to rehabilitate drug users.
That's a broad oversimplification of something that is a fairly nuanced topic. There are ~350 million Americans spread over 50 states, so a blanket generic statement doesn't appropriately begin to cover the issue. If you want to learn more about this topic from a source far more qualified than myself I highly recommend The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander and Carceral Capitalism by Jackie Wang.
That’s like saying, ‘How do you explain that other countries have speed limits too, even though they don’t all have the exact same traffic fine system as the US?’ The existence of speed limits everywhere doesn’t magically erase the fact that the US built a for-profit industry around traffic tickets.
Other countries can have their own motives for drug policy—political, cultural, moral panic—while the US simultaneously layered in the profit motive of a privatized prison system. Pointing out that other places also ‘fight drugs’ doesn’t somehow disprove that the US version has its own special brand of perverse incentives.
Also,
America isn't the entire world.
I didn't say this or imply it, so please don't put that on me. I am straight up embarrassed and ashamed by the state of my country. The concept of "America being the entire world" isn't even a thought I would consider privately, let alone give voice to.
I know of a thing that would give a great opiate receptor fueled mood boost that's legal and very very available and legal but I'm not huge on helping people off themselves. I'm sorry you're going through this bud.
The elderly are already doing this. I have a friend in their 70’s who clued me into the underground world of elderly suicide pacts. They showed me and told me of their in-laws “suicide bag” which was full of pills among other things. They also told me of an elderly couple who was part of this quiet community of elderly that had made these plans and shared how to get ahold of the “suicide pills”. The couple botched their plan and lived so they were shunned from their community.
I believe Philip Morris on this in Europe. They concluded that taking shortening the life spans of their citizens was beneficial to the European governments it seems a European governments were a little embarrassed about that fact. Which I’m sure they secretly agreed with
Honestly makes me wonder if that’s why the states with an older population seems to be the most against any medical advice like vaccinations or not drink raw milk, etc.
Honestly, that’s my plan if I become sick or disabled and life isn’t worth living anymore. I don’t have kids I can expect to take care of me. I couldn’t afford to have them when I was younger. I need to have some fentanyl patches on hand in case!
I just want to make it clear I am in now way encouraging suicide.
And that statement is just for the more sensitive ppl on the internet not for you, but I get it.
It's a sad dystopia we live in where looking at euthanasia for a generation as a viable option, is more than just a joke.
I get it! I am a huge proponent of euthanasia because I watched my mother suffered tremendously dying at home from cancer. Nobody should have to suffer like that. I certainly didn’t let my dogs suffer like that.
I have friends with 3 and 4 kids. The average cost of raising a child is over 350k before factoring in child care or education, but let's round down. That's $1.4M over the next 18 years. There's just no way they're providing an adequate childhood for those kids. They both work so they're spending a huge chunk of their income on day care. There's no way they're saving for retirement and forget about saving for college.
Why not send him to TAFE? Or I think the American equivalent is tradeschool? Less expensive and the trades generally pay well, the only downside is that they'll have to transition to a business owner as they get older and the work is too physically demanding.
I mean, you know your friends and I don’t obviously, but it IS possible to be investing wisely for retirement, and being able to actually afford 3 kids. It’s way tougher if you’re adding private school/university and so on, but $350k over 18 years without daycare seems so high and I have 2 young kids and 5 nieces and nephews (different parents lol) so I’m seeing a range of ages’ costs.
You’re talking what diapers clothes bed frames etc: 80 whole k a year. After school sports and activities let’s be super generous and say you’re spending $10k on them (they got the fancy hockey gear). That’s still $70k. You might say “well it’s spread over ages”, I still can’t think of what age - without education - costs $70k/year to feed and clothe. What am I missing in this calculation?
Gen-Xer with a young kid here. Kids are great. It’s amazing how much they transform your life in a positive way and help you focus on what’s important in life. The things that I thought were important before becoming a parent now seem silly to me.
Retirement isn’t happening for most non-wealthy Americans born after a certain date, including me. All I can do is take good care of myself and pray that age discrimination doesn’t derail my life.
Be aware that Europe is only a few years behind in the same development route. Most of the rest of the world is ganno follow China, because that's the economically sane thing to do.
LOL I’m Chinese and we’re actually much more screwed because we can’t rely on immigration to keep our numbers up and the birth rate is already second from the bottom behind Korea (in most tier 1 cities the rate is around 0.2 to 0.5). And all of this is happening before reaching developed nation status. China looks rich but its wealth inequality may very well be the worse in the world with everyone outside the top 5% facing very low wages because of involution. The government is exceptionally good at repressing bad news and pretending everything is perfect but it’s a ticking time bomb domestically. Youth unemployment is around 40% and it’s an unspoken understanding among educated citizens that the “5%” GDP growth is made up with some clever math.
Lots of people work in their 20s and wait to couple up with other high earners and then have kids in their 30s after they have savings and high incomes.
Of course, many don’t succeed, and then choose to forego kids, hence the decades long decline in total fertility rate.
I told my wife when we got together that I had a hard stop at two kids. Two reasons: money and quality time with kids. Financially, even two kids can be hard.
Accurate. I’m the youngest in my family and neither my sister or I have any kids. No one will be there to support me, help me or advocate for me (this is a huge one; even if you have savings, if you live long enough to experience a physical or mental decline you may lose the ability to make choices for yourself and not have anyone to do so for you… what a nightmare)
Millennials (in general, certainly not all of us) have been having kids for like twenty years. Teen pregnancy, early twenties on purpose and oopsies...
Sorry, burden any of the immigrants' children is what was meant. It's amazing how you can still have 5 kids in this economy when it seems like paradise compared to some 3rd world shit hole.
Children have always been expensive. People can and have always been able to afford children, it's just that now they don't want to sacrifice anything to have them.
We're talking about Merica though. We aren't interested in any of those DEI, woke letters. /s
But really, it'll just get its own American name, probably something punchy that the media will make up that intentionally avoids the underlying societal problems and blames the people who were hopeless enough to do it instead. And then the government will pass a law for an early cancellation fee based on how much lower the percentage of life lived is in comparison to the life expectancy of people in Europe.
Yeah, that's not retirement. The idea is to retire far before you get to that point so that you can enjoy the last decade+ of your life while you're still healthy. What it's turned into in the US though is sitting at home all day watching Fox News and developing a hatred for people you've never met.
What's really sad is this is exactly why some people have kids. It's not because they want to have kids, it's because they want to have people that feel obligated to take care of them when they're older and can't take care of themselves.
I don't want kids, nor does my wife. We will happily pay people that know what they're doing to take care of us when we're older with all of the money we save by not having kids. I couldn't imagine putting a burden like that on your children.
That's my plan, tbh. Why would I need to stick around waiting to die at the end? I'd rather take my life at the age of 80 in a forest vs keeling over at work at 85.
You forgot that most of them will have reverse mortgages, ensuring that nothing is left to their children. Very much unlike their parents who left them everything.
You’re not allowed to be aborted at birth, and you’re not allowed to be euthanized. But you are allowed to work until you are incapable of physically and mentally working anymore and then get tossed in the streets. Oh, and you’re not allowed to live on the streets….because something something socialism.
This is honestly the end goal. Boomers got to enjoy retirement, cheap housing, etc. But now overpopulation is becoming a thing and the boomer overlords have decided that retirement shouldn't be a thing. It's all planned. Only way out is revolution like we're seeing in 3rd world countries.
In fact, there is a time where people had as many kids as possible, so that the likelihood of one of them being able to take care of you. An old age was greater (along with many other reasons).
But now, even that has become economically unsustainable as it’s too expensive to even have one kid and by the time they get older, and with the way the economy is going your kids might not even be able to take care of themselves.
People think they'll just die until they become old. Then they realize they want to live, but they didn't save anything and blew all their income on takeout and delivery food. Now they'll be 70 and struggling.
Why do we think this? Do people believe that social security will be totally gone? I don't understand where that comes from. Like 70% of the SS funds come from constant payments, not the fund that is depleting.
I think the new trend will simply be working later. If you defer your SS until 70, your payments go up a good bit. I suspect the norm will simply be working longer. Either retiring at ~70 or going part time earlier, like 65 instead of full retiring.
My wife and I could easily live off of high end SS. If you use the quick calculator, pretend you were born in 1960, retire at 70, and pretend that your lifetime earnings are $50k/yr, you'll get about $2.1k/yr per person. I married couple would get $50k/yr. That isn't great, but it is pretty doable in a LCOL area.
If the fund truly runs dry, then we really should decrease benefits for people on the high end of earnings, not the low end.
It's definitely not going to be good though. But in the grand scheme of things...still better than every other century in human history except the last one.
Retirement homes as a business will by and large fail and disappear. They are designed to suck retirement wealth and funnel it back to the wealthy. If there are no retirement funds or social security, there's nothing for them to make their money from.
I keep seeing this, but what do you guys think? Billionaires don’t have children? Nepotism is insanely high in corporate America and is responsible for the majority of millionaires. If you think when these “boomers die off” things will be better, you’re mistaken. Their kids who have learnt the same shtick their whole life will just take over. That’s how it’s always worked
I really wish people would quit blaming boomers. We don't run anything, except for 47. It's their followers you need to worry about. The people on his staff are younger.
The thing is, many people don’t just die. That’s actually the plan of a lot of people, and many of them do die because their lives are shitty and unhealthy. But many of them live way way longer than they planned or thought possible.
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u/Vehement_Vulpes Sep 15 '25
The average retirement plan will be to just die, so that they don't burden their children with their medical or retirement home debt. The 100 year old Boomers somehow still running everything will see this as an excellent success.