News

23014 readers

2 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil

Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.

2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.

Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.

3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.

Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.

4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.

Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.

5. Only recent news is allowed.

Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.

6. All posts must be news articles.

No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.

7. No duplicate posts.

If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.

8. Misinformation is prohibited.

Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.

9. No link shorteners.

The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.

10. Don't copy entire article in your post body

For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

485

A boomer retirement bomb is about to blow up America's economy (www.businessinsider.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

214 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The great baby-boomer retirement wave is upon us. According to Census Bureau data, 44% of boomers are at retirement age and millions more are soon to join them. By 2030, the largest generation to enter retirement will all be older than 65.

The general assumption is that boomers will have a comfortable retirement. Coasting on their accumulated wealth from three decades as America's dominant economic force, boomers will sail off into their golden years to sip on margaritas on cruises and luxuriate in their well-appointed homes. After all, Federal Reserve data shows that while the 56 million Americans over 65 make up just 17% of the population, they hold more than half of America's wealth — $96.4 trillion.

But there's a flaw in the narrative of a sunny boomer retirement: A lot of older Americans are not set up for their later years. Yes, many members of the generation are loaded, but many more are not. Like every age cohort, there's significant wealth inequality among retirees — and it's gotten worse in the past decade. Despite holding more than half of the nation's wealth, many boomers don't have enough money to cover the costs of long-term care, and 43% of 55- to 64-year-olds had no retirement savings at all in 2022. That year, 30% of people over 65 were economically insecure, meaning they made less than $27,180 for a single person. And since younger boomers are less financially prepared for retirement than their older boomer siblings, the problem is bound to get worse.

As boomers continue to age out of the workforce, it's going to put strain on the healthcare system, government programs, and the economy. That means more young people are going to be financially responsible for their parents, more government spending will be allocated to older folks, and economic growth could slow.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Mostly to me it's just really funny. Like it's also really sad, that's true, but it's also funny, because of almost how incredibly stupid and shortsighted it is. Like, what does everyone think is gonna happen in 50 or 60 years? All the zoomers and millenials perpetuating this shit are just gonna get blamed equally by all of gen alpha and beta for deflecting all the blame onto boomers, and having done nothing to prevent, or even turn back, say, climate change. Or microplastics, or maybe like, if they're really on the level, all of gen alpha will really get on their parents case for being absentee parents that abandoned them to a horrible digital wasteland via ipad.

Like unless we gain empathy, and, beyond that, understanding, as to why each generation acted the way they did, unless we gain that insight and historical context, we're just gonna keep treading water, as every new generation has to figure out everything by themselves, and can never learn from the mistakes of their progenitors. You don't even need to like boomers, or boomer culture, or really even like, morally approve of why they did the things they did, you just need to understand how they justified it, and what they were thinking at the time. But people don't wanna do that, instead it's just easier to blame the olds.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I think one of the things you're saying, and which I might rephrase, is the idea that a generational cohort and the political landscape of a nation during a period of time, is the byproduct of a truly incomprehensible number of factors beyond any one person's or any one group's control. Also, no one group of people is a monolith. There are plenty of conservative millennials, and it looks like Gen Z is going to be more conservative than Millennials in a number of ways. As one person online I saw put it "the kids are puritan pilled." And of course even that's not true for all of them. We're all products of the world in which we live and it's easy to judge people harshly who came before you because the world as it is now seems to be worse than the world as you imagine it was. But our perception of time and history is also imperfect, and we selectively forget and remember the past.