The boomers are truly the most selfish generation that exists, I tried explaining to a boomer the other day that if they shut down social security and did a buyout (paid you back what you paid in) they would make more money than they will ever receive from SS. They immediately became defensive and said “they paid into it for years so they deserve it”. Second round of buyout explanation ensues. The next sentence was “well I’d have millions if I’d invested it myself”. Cool story, we can’t undo you being dumb and voting democrat your entire life, but you can unfuck the social security clusterfuck for every other generation. “But I need it now”. Then third round of trying to explain the buyout. “But I could have more money if it was fixed when I was younger”. You should have voted for it. Then they shut down the conversation. They truly are the TV generation where their entire thought process came scripted and curated, they can’t even comprehend ending a horrible policy because they were told it would give them more money. Same with the infinity immigration they pushed because more money. Same with the intentional housing scarcity. On and on. There’s not one single brain cell that doesn’t operate on “well I’m going to get mine” even to their own detriment.
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The amount of people that don't understand that social security is a literal ponzi scheme is honestly frightening
More pyramid than ponzi, but the point stands.
No, it's basically definitionally a Ponzi scheme; they're paying the older people who "joined" first (at gunpoint), with the money paid in by the younger generation, to make it look like the system is working.
It's all propped up by new "investment." It's a Ponzi scheme.
It's a little bit of both, though, I'll admit, since it does incentivize people to keep the scam going which equates to demanding more people join, which is similar to a pyramid scheme in concept as well. But considering people aren't actively recruiting for social security, it's much more similar to a Ponzi scheme than a pyramid.
The reason it is a pyramid scheme is because it requires an ever increasing number of people paying in at the bottom to pay out at the top. That makes it worse than a Ponzi scheme, because it is impossible for a population to grow indefinitely.
Both a pyramid and a Ponzi scheme involve bringing in new investors/investments.
But a pyramid scheme involves the investors going out and recruiting. A Ponzi scheme is more centralized, and recruitment is done from the top, generally. Social security is too centralized to be a pyramid scheme. Boomers aren't going door-to-door saying you have to sign up for SS...the government already signed you up.
So, it's actually worse than both a pyramid or Ponzi scheme, since you're not getting scammed, you're getting robbed.
It's a Ponzi scheme where you invest at gunpoint.
So does the ponzi.
The piramid scheme pays out just enough at each individual level to make the rubes feel they are actually gaining, because each rube is screwing over the rubes below them. The guys on level 9 are profiting off the guys at level 10, and the guys at level 8 are profiting off of both. From the top to the middle everyone is actually profiting off of doing nothing, by milking the guys in the lower levels. Next to nothing is even coming from sales of the "product," and while the guys at the top are making out the most, some of the middle is actually making millions along the way too.
It's a derivative of the ponsi scheme, but not the same, because a whole bunch of people in the middle are actually making money and contributing to the scam in their own greed.
Nobody invested in SS is making money off of SS, only the political class who are grifting and stealing from it at the top. Ie, a ponzi scheme. You may be trying to think forth dimensionaly that the boomers invested in the past are level 5 and you are level 10, so they are somehow profiting off of you like a pyramid scam, but they are not. They had their money stolen too, they are just too dumb to realise it.
Technically the government is moving around money so both maybe?
Ponzi fits much better. It has elements of a pyramid scheme, because the two are similar, but considering it's the government and not the "investors" getting new people into the system, it's hard to say it's completely a pyramid scheme, since it's missing that element.
"I paid, I paid, I paid"
No, boomer, I pay. You don't have a fucking savings account at the Social Security building. Money comes out of my paycheck and into your check.
Just tell them the first generation to receive benefits never paid into it and it’s been on the back foot ever since.
Next time, tell them that the taxes they paid while they were working were not held for them, they were spent as payments to those already receiving benefits, and the amount of benefits they will get will outstrip what they paid in by far, unless they die within a decade of going on Social Security.
Social security is a pyramid scheme, period dot, and the only reason it still exists today is because old people outvote all other age demographics by far.
Oh, and speaking as Gen X, FUCK BOOMERS.
Boomers also caused the student loan crisis by convincing everyone to go to college and get a degree in anything at all, even if they couldn’t afford it. It is an awkward dichotomy of them living off things their kids are paying for while also having shackled a lot of their kids with $150k+ in debt by the time they were 20.
My parents are great and approach literal saints, but Boomers as a demographic did fuck everyone and cause this mess. That’s why in Asian there are mass movements of younger people no longer supporting them or helping out. They were the first gen that had a higher standard than those before and after them.
My favorite is the boomers that are very well off still collect social security even though they have no need. I've known legitimate millionaire boomers who still collect social security every month because, "well, I paid into it".
I don't blame them. The government has explicitly said that it is not a welfare program. The justification for holding it out of our paychecks was that the government would hold on to it for us so that it would be there when we are older.
The government should just convert them over to individual retirement accounts for each citizen, like they do with the TSP for federal workers.
You'd decline it? They paid way more into it than they'll ever collect. I don't blame them one bit.
What am I going to do with a few hundred dollars a month when I'm a millionaire? That's a drop in the bucket.
Donate it if you don't want to keep it, but whatever you do it'll be more valuable than letting the government waste it.
Boomers have been taught that the best thing would be to die at the moment they've spent and enjoyed every dime on their own hedonistic pursuits with nothing left over for their progeny.
It's honestly pathetic how thoroughly an entire generation was brainwashed into mindless consumerism.
Social security is for the kind of people who win the lottery and end up in the poor house because they can't manage money or plan for the future.
In other words, most Americans.
Whatever plan you imagine as better has to account for hordes of destitute old people with nothing and nothing to lose or it's not a real plan.
You aren't going to account for hordes of destitute olds with a government policy. The nuclear family has to be rolled back. And that will only happen if pre-retirees are horrified by what their parents end up going through.
You mean re-implemented? Successful progeny should be the default retirement plan for most people I think.
Rolled back. The nuclear family replaced multi-generational living that would afford people to retire to live with their children.
It will take an epidemic of homeless retirees to break the boomer-induced mindset that children become competition when they turn 18.
Its a 401k
I mean realistically a buyout would just be a transfer to private capital firms, but you'd still be better off than the government.
The insane thing is the people coming here fresh off the boat, never paid a dime in taxes, qualify for disability because they can't read or write, and somehow collect SS checks for life. Explain THAT boomer. And it will never stop as long as the system exists because they'll justify free riders for their own lazy fat asses.
I can't get over the mindset of "I don't care if (((the state))) robs my children and grandchildren, so long as I get a (tiny) cut".
Imagine if you used that money to buy your kids a house outright, then they paid it directly back to you. Of course, that would require you to push back on the sexual degeneracy and participation trophy culture, which means you'd also have to practice what your preach.
Late boomer here. I'll agree that a large number of boomers are absolutely stupid and greedy. A fairly large number have also trying to get this fixed for years. This entire issue goes back to the "greatest generation" that started this Ponzi scheme. When I was 15, I was forced to participate against my better judgement. The system has done more than rob me, it has robbed the next generation as well. I believe it was Johnson that first used the social security trust fund to buy US bonds to fund the war in Vietnam. They borrowed our money with the promise that we would pay it back. Absolute theft. I think every president since has borrowed from it by way of buying Treasury bonds. The next generation needs a way to opt out and control their own investments. Having a Democrat or Republican plan to choose from will allow the theft to continue
I hope no one on this board is counting on social security still being around as part of their retirement strategy. I know I'm not.
Lol I'm not counting on this country even being around, let alone me being alive for long enough to collect it. Whites are going to be a minority in this country soon and we all know what happens to them once they go from being a majority to a minority. We could reverse that trend, but the current administration seems to be putting that on hold to protect their kike masters.
I'm not counting on it, but I want it to stick around. If we can afford funding Israel and fighting their wars for them, we can afford funding retirement for our own people.
There's gonna need to be some serious reframing of who gets to fall under that rubric in my opinion.
White Americans
Ideally, we'd discern ideologically as well, but that can get murky.
Your terms are acceptable and proper.
It's easy to blame Boomers but you have to remember who raised them. Their parents grew up during a depression and with heavy propaganda about the New Deal.
Their parents also left them cumulative wealth, that’s something the boomers aren’t leaving their kids, it’s a race to blow it all before they die.
This boomer stuff is also so silly.
Check out the Asch conformity experiments. Repeated all over the world, hundreds of times.
62% of every gender, every race, every nationality, every generation, anywhere in the world, at any time in history: 62% of the population does whatever the most immediately apparent "expert" says they should. Even if they KNOW it's wrong.
62% of EVERY generation is basically non-sentient. It may be painfully more apparent to you with boomers because they are the generation that voted for this stuff, but theGreatest, X, millenials and zoomers are no different. They just haven't had power long enough to prove it to you.
“But muh social science conjecture!”
The asch experiment showed that the majority are above outside influence, not your claim. The audacity to pretend there aren’t massive fluctuations in this based on sex, race and nationality is also completely contradictory to every single study on this. This is shown repeatedly on agreeable/ disagreeable studies that women are 2:1 over men on agreeableness. Just like people with lower/ mid IQs tend to be more conforming than higher IQs. The same is seen with people who have an internal monologue are more disagreeable than those without one.
Wrong, you made a false assumption about my claim and poorly absorbed the data.
Those fluctuations absolutely exist, but they are counted within the 38% who are sentient.
Uh, yeah. That's called overlap. Same separation of sentience vs non. Both cross sections (asch has been repeated far more times than any study into internal monologues) imply that some humans are simply not independent entities capable of free thought. And both seem to imply that number is well above 50%.
You can go back further if you like, and Plato was saying the same thing about the cave.
The number of people who are not capable of free thought or "disagreement" remains the same across all subtypes. It's in the actual freethinker range that you find the additional differences.
Maybe learn to read, the 38% were those who the study WAS ABLE TO INFLUENCE.
They don’t. In fact that number is only a majority when you COUNT ON A GLOBAL SCALE. Again you can’t read or even understand the study you tried citing.
This is true, I know boomers, they are dumb as shit consoomers who huff Faux News, but Millenials are the same, and so are zoomers. Previous generations believed the lies about WW2 and oversaw the creation of..the boomers. Nothing exists in a vacuum.
Every one of them blows more money in the last six months of staving off death than they paid into Medicare their entire lifetime.
They have no incentive to care. The system will bankrupt itself just to get them paid out and it won't be their problem afterwards since they'll be dead.
The overlap between right wing populism and left wing populism is where we view the mentality of boomers - we agree on this part.
However, our answer is to give them back the money they threw in the system and dismantle it.
Their answer for it is to steal from them and give it to the government to "fix" their problems.
And these boomers who voted for Trump don't get that if they're spazzing over their SS being taken.
is the money even there to buy out social security recipients? The population of old people in the United States is roughly 60 million plus. let's make a generous estimate and say all those people paid an average grand total of $20,000 into social security over their entire lifetime.
that alone is $1,200,000,000,000, or 1.2 trillion dollars, and that doesn't include the population under 60.
1.2 trillion is a drop in the bucket considering we spent 1.35 trillion in 2023 on SS alone. Frankly we could spend 6 trillion and come out positive in 5 years.
maybe try using the term payout next time you try to explain it to them, instead of buyout, might help with clarity.
If we make an agreement where I pay money in and you promise I'm getting at least that much money back later, then you're going to pay me back. That's how agreements work.
The next candidate to run on what you just said will win. Boomers are dying off and no longer have the political clout they once had. If I wanted to win I would go right for the throat and vow to fuck boomers over, rob them of their social security, cut them off cold, and pay out the younger generations everything they paid into it already and close the program down for good. You'd get every vote from the 55 and younger crowd. It's time to 80/20 the boomers into political irrelevance. I'd drive a delicate wedge between boomers and every other younger generation for the sole purpose of highlighting all the other shitty policies boomers support. It would basically create new neural pathways in people, letting them finally comprehend reality.
...I want to call this first order thinking, but does it even qualify as that!?!
Yes. I've had the same conversation. They are retarded.
There quite literally isn't enough money to do that. I don't mean in government coffers, I mean on earth.
There's no money in the Social Security fund anyways, only government
IOUsbonds. The real money was spent a long time ago, by Clinton if I recall correctly (which is where his famous "budget surplus" came from).But government debt is as good as cash. At least, that's what all the finance bros say.
It really sucks for Gen X having a Boomer generation on either side of them