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[scriver]

I mean. I'd rather young people be made homeless than old people. We're healthier and better suited to fighting other hobos over sleeping bags and what else

[McTraveller]

Too bad I have to go into the office today... so much to discuss....

Partly, I am definitely in the camp that thought those scooters were medicare, not SS, but maybe I was wrong...  Also note that medicare withholding in taxes is not capped like FICA.

Anyway.... later....

[sluissa]

Also of note, while it's like anything in government and not nearly as simple as can be explained easily, the idea with social security, at least with regards to retirees, is that the money you put into it is ostensibly the money you get out of it later. It goes into a massive trust fund, and while that fund does have some very stable investments going on(as far as I know just government bonds) that grow it very slowly, the value that went into that fund as you pay your taxes into it is supposed to be the same value that comes out of it. There's also the not entirely without merit argument that the whole thing is silly when it's the government borrowing money from itself in currency it's able to print more or less freely, but that's another argument.

The point is, the idea of "oh, we can't support the baby boomers because the worker pool is shrinking" shouldn't matter, because the boomers are getting the money they put in back out, just in the same idea that once the current working generations retire, they'll pull the value out they paid taxes in to provide. We're not paying for our parents SS payments, they paid for them. Just like our kids won't pay for ours since we already paid them.

Now, as I said it's not 100% that simple either, because over time the payouts are bumped up due to inflation and cost of living increases and various political maneuvers, because nobody wants to be accused of reducing retirees benefits. The government bond investments do a lot to help mitigate the inflation aspect and even add a little beyond it, but it doesn't make up for all the factors that drain from it beyond their means to contribute.

There might be some truth in the fact that the SS trust would eventually run out, but there's no reason it's destined to except through sheer bullheadedness. A semi-temporary increase in revenue would keep it alive. Removing the cap on income taxed(but not increase the max payout faster than already increasing) would help drastically. And in 30 years or so when the population returns to more or less normal ratios, that revenue increase might be able to be reduced again. Or more smartly, the program expanded into a more robust welfare system, maybe even including health within it.

[Frumple]

Wunnit (the major?) part of the problem so far as in-this-lifetime-dissolution of social security something about the funds that were in SS being shanghai'd for other uses? If my memory's not failing me yet again. Basically that money ostensibly paid to yourself (well, if you're under somewhere in the 40s or 50s) in the future by way of government trust got fucked into some fiscal hole or another before you started pulling it back out. Part of the myriad ways our elders have been screwing the younger generations over, heh.

Want to say I remember it happening mostly because a certain set of fucks (with somewhat more across the aisle support a decade or two ago, for what that's worth) keep doing their damnedest to defund sodding everything, too. Sometimes via screwing tax revenue, sometimes other means. Memory's pretty fuzzy on the details, though. It's one of those things I paid more attention to at one point, but got slotted into the general "fuck the republican party with a nail encrusted cactus" sentiment that's been building as the shits keep trying to wreck my goddamn country and sodomize my and upcoming generations into the dirt.

[sluissa]

Wunnit (the major?) part of the problem so far as in-this-lifetime-dissolution of social security something about the funds that were in SS being shanghai'd for other uses? If my memory's not failing me yet again. Basically that money ostensibly paid to yourself (well, if you're under somewhere in the 40s or 50s) in the future by way of government trust got fucked into some fiscal hole or another before you started pulling it back out. Part of the myriad ways our elders have been screwing the younger generations over, heh.

Want to say I remember it happening mostly because a certain set of fucks (with somewhat more across the aisle support a decade or two ago, for what that's worth) keep doing their damnedest to defund sodding everything, too. Sometimes via screwing tax revenue, sometimes other means. Memory's pretty fuzzy on the details, though. It's one of those things I paid more attention to at one point, but got slotted into the general "fuck the republican party with a nail encrusted cactus" sentiment that's been building as the shits keep trying to wreck my goddamn country and sodomize my and upcoming generations into the dirt.

Again, a lot of that was spin. The excess SS funds from about 1967 on were put into government bonds. Government bonds are used to pay for other government projects, but they must be paid back with interest. So yes, in one manner SS funds were used to fund other government projects, but not without a guarantee they'd be paid back, and then some.

EDIT: The SS program worked fine up until the 80s, It was readjusted and continued to have income above expenses until about 2010. It can be adjusted again and work fine for another 30+ years. Without adjustment the money will run out in a decade or two, but it's not impossible to keep it running. It just requires some tweaking every few decades. A not unreasonable expectation for a program of that size and in a world that changes as much as it does.

[Rolan7]

Ah so, the government bought its own bonds?  Basically gave itself a loan?
I'd be surprised except NPR mentioned something very similar a week or two ago.  Accounting is complicated, and the federal government has many largely-independent parts.

[sluissa]

Ah so, the government bought its own bonds?  Basically gave itself a loan?
I'd be surprised except NPR mentioned something very similar a week or two ago.  Accounting is complicated, and the federal government has many largely-independent parts.

Sort of? Except the SS Trust isn't supposed to be "government funds." It's a seperate account set aside just for the SS program. Think of it more like if you were personally taking a loan from your 401k/retirement account. There are situations where you can access that money before retirement, but there are usually penalties/interest to be paid. The interest on the bonds are the penalties the government pays. SS money isn't really "their money" it belongs to the people who paid into it, under the trust of the government. But it would also be a bad decision to simply let it sit there and die off due to inflation with no investment to maintain/grow it.

[Rolan7]

Thanks, yeah it should be emphasized that the SS funds aren't supposed to be spent.  And investing in completely safe bonds isn't really spending...  Even if, in effect, they're borrowing money out of a designated fund and spending it elsewhere.  They have to pay it back or they'd be defaulting on treasury bonds, which is hopefully still unthinkable.

I think the NPR thing was about calling back loans the government had granted to internal agencies or possibly local governments, to increase capital.  It was a while ago though, sorry.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

See, Boomers are so used to getting their way that that's status quo to them.  Getting everything they want is mediocrity, ruling everything is equality.  A petty but representative example of this would be Christmas.  US toy advertising is designed to manipulate kids into harassing their parents into spending large amounts of money.  My impression is that a lot of older working class men in America see/saw Christmas as something stressful they do for the kids.  They spend a lot of money, fall off ladders putting up Christmas lights, ect. ect.  Its a sacrifice.  But if you look at what Christmas actually is in America, its super focused on Boomers.  Every song, every Christmas movie is from the 90s.  And the narrative around Christmas, of uniting the family and decorating the house, that's what Boomers care about.  It doesn't reflect millennial values at all.  This isn't to say that Christmas has hurt Millennials exactly.  Its more that, to paraphrase Randal Munroe, "every year since the 90s we've been recreating the Christmas of the Boomers' childhood".

Now that I've returned from the wildlands, this (and the relevant xkcd) are very interesting observations. It brings me to a lot of background thoughts I have just about every year on Christmas specifically but also the way holiday culture has changed between the boomers and the millennials due to value drift.

See, I've come to be of two minds about Christmas. When I was young and didn't know anything, I of course got the boomer treatment most exemplified by my grandparents and their demands we visit them and perform all manner of Christmas things. My parents, Gen-Xers, had a certain amount of stress related to this but mostly seemed to accept it as unspoken necessity. The first few Christmases I have memory of mostly fit this platonic ideal of what Christmas is "supposed to be". I get new videogames, I suffer through opening clothes I don't care about, I bake cookies with my grandma...but the cracks were there from the start as well. One memory that stands out is my mother just full bore screaming at my father as he tries to fix the tire on the car in pouring rain, our obscenely large sack of gifts for every extended relative under the sun crowding me out of my seat. Angry drunken murmuring in the days before and after Christmas proper. My parents pushing me for a longer gift list while also complaining about how little money we have left.

As things of this nature went on and I got older, I began to withdraw from all this. The way boomer Christmas portrays things, children want gifts above all else and think of Christmas as the highlight of the year. By the time I was a teenager Christmastime became more of an ordeal than anything else, and I could not care less about the "benefits". I began to "not know what I wanted" for Christmas, which I really did not since all I could think about was the short period between the start of winter break and the beginning of the Christmas week to New Years clusterfuck which was sure to happen. The year of my parents' divorce I genuinely lost track of the date until I saw my father's attempt at Christmas "for me", a two foot plastic tree with a couple of games - and it's not that I didn't appreciate him caring, but that there was a certain banal absurdity to him doing that just for me in a time when I was far happier with proceedings than he was, particularly in the backdrop of "standard Christmases" several years prior and my past apathy towards it. I think I might actually have come to dislike instead of just ignore the holiday in that very moment.

I say all this because I don't think my experience with "Christmas hell" is at all unique, and it comes back to the cultural weight of the boomers, mostly crushing Gen-Xers and being rejected by millennials. The culture of not just Christmas, but the lifescript in general. How people celebrate other holidays, how they have families, how they judge media, how they have vacations...if millennials are disrespectful bohemians then I think Xers might just be driven neurotic and crazy by the personal and collective demands of the boomers, their literal parents. Just think about the whole War on Christmas debacle. The religious aspect of the holiday gets smaller and smaller the further you get away from boomers, and it drives them fucking nuts, so much so that you get mass social movement over what amounts to pedantry over things like "Happy Holidays" and "keeping Christ in Christmas".

This is why boomers are the generation of perfect marital bliss, the Xers are the generation of divorce and domestic violence, and why millennials are the generation of tinder fuckbuddies and unmarried cohabitation. They're all connected in influence to one another. The boomers place marriage as an ideal, the Xers try way too goddamn hard to live up to it and drive themselves crazy, and the millennials experience this in childhood then understand the whole thing might be fucking bogus, at which point the boomers criticize them as sinful libertines. While the Xers...uh...well from what I've seen all the post-divorce Xers are just trying to party to death or even emulate the millennial style.

My point is, whether Christmas or divorce, you see this ideal-breaking-rejection generational path for a lot of shit in American culture, and in pretty much everything that people write millennial hit piece articles on. Except the avocado toast, I don't know what that's all about.

[MrRoboto75]

I propose that Christmas has won the war on Christmas.  The elves have already enveloped Halloween and Thanksgiving.  Currently, the Christmas front is slowly advancing through the holiday-less hellscape that is August.

[Rolan7]

Wow.  Unexpected, here, but I can't even tell you how much I needed such a relatable explanation of the generation issues of Christmas.  Divorced parents are definitely the norm in my group of friends, but nobody talks about Christmas with family.  I assumed it was still positive for them, somehow.

Whereas it's been getting harder for me by the year.  To me, this season represents heart-rendingly transparent attempts by my parents to keep things jolly, even 10 years after the divorce.  And exhausting attempts on my part to play along.  Two years ago I literally freaked out and ran from one half, and spent months "making up for that".

I wish I could play the atheism card   Our celebrations are too secular for it to really fly, though.  Even though they're "technically" Christian.

This is why boomers are the generation of perfect marital bliss, the Xers are the generation of divorce and domestic violence, and why millennials are the generation of tinder fuckbuddies and unmarried cohabitation. They're all connected in influence to one another. The boomers place marriage as an ideal, the Xers try way too goddamn hard to live up to it and drive themselves crazy, and the millennials experience this in childhood then understand the whole thing might be fucking bogus, at which point the boomers criticize them as sinful libertines. While the Xers...uh...well from what I've seen all the post-divorce Xers are just trying to party to death or even emulate the millennial style.

This makes SO much sense to me.

My point is, whether Christmas or divorce, you see this ideal-breaking-rejection generational path for a lot of shit in American culture, and in pretty much everything that people write millennial hit piece articles on. Except the avocado toast, I don't know what that's all about.

I heard they hate memes they don't understand.  So they made a meme about something they don't understand, so they could hate the meme, while not understanding?  Maybe they got confused by the Jeb guac memes.
IDK, avocados are amazing but I don't have a toaster.

[RedKing]

As a post-divorce GenX'er, I endorse this post. And yeah, I find myself basically trying more to live like younger generations (renting, extremely unorthodox family structure, not even thinking about home ownership or marriage ever again, not worried about having a nice car, trying to give my kids experiences instead of stuff, etc.).

The thing is, I wasn't raised by Boomers. I was raised by "Greatest Generationers" in a pretty happy, stable household. So I'm not abandoning their ideals out of rejection, I'm abandoning them because I don't have any fucking choice. I can't afford a nice car, I can't afford a house (plus have seen how home ownership is a trap when the economy favors a highly mobile, disposable workforce), I can't afford lots of stuff for my kids. I don't ever want to get married again, because I'm going to financially be crippled by the divorce for another 10 years.

GenX'ers are scrambling to cope with an economy that just doesn't allow for the life their parents and grandparents had (it might allow for the life their grandparents had when they were *kids* -- i.e. the Great Depression). But when we started adulting, it was still achievable, it just meant we had to work a little harder. Then a little harder than that. Then harder than that. Before we knew it, we're all working 60-70 hours a week in stagnant wages to try and provide for our families the way we were provided for, and failing at it. And then feeling like failures, and coping with booze, opioids, Netflix and bitter, sarcastic humor.

Whereas millenials saw that the party was over before they even joined in. So they've been creating their own new way of doing things. And us GenX folks are now hitting the point where we can't work any harder, we can't take it anymore, we've accepted we're never going to do as good as our parents, and we just want a fucking break. I think in the next 5-10 years, you're going to see a massive wave of divorces, foreclosures, bankruptcies, and a movement of GenX people trying to become late-comer millenials. Which is kind of messed-up on its own, because it means a lot of middle-aged people trying to be considerably younger than they are (witness the rise of the 'cougar'). I'm wondering if it's going to be as painful as watching Mitt Romney ask "Who let the dogs out?".

[redwallzyl]

Maybe its because a lot of my relatives are Canadian but my Christmases tend to just be family get togethers with everyone giving a few gifts out to their parents or the kids.

[scriver]

Ye, pretty much.

[Frumple]

Close family, sure, but when chunks of that are working two jobs or whatever and buried under debt/health-issues-they-can't-afford-to-treat/etc., like. Even with pretty minimal stuff stress can get involved real easy.