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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

The whole pension situation is going to blow up completely. As a GenX, I fully expect to have to work well into my 70's and then finally get a state pension (if I get one at all) completely inadequate to support me.

Boomers are the major political force, and so pensions are good now. But as soon as enough of them die off, GenY/Millenials will be the dominant demographic and all the remaining pension funds will get ransacked for benefits to the young.

A bit like Student Loans all over again (Boomers got their education for free, GenX had to pay, Millenials got shafted), except it'll just be GenX getting the finger this time.

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I upvoted you because I tend to agree. However, I came to a different conclusion as to why benefits like pensions and social security will be underfunded for Gen X.

It basically all comes down to tax policy. Boomers voted to cut taxes (especially on the wealthy) to roughly half what they should be, and ran up the national debt to match the GDP when there was no war or other crisis to justify it.

The founding fathers warned against that, because if one generation offloads its debt to the next, then it effectively enslaves the next against its will (deprives it of property, and taxes it without representation, among other things). This is self-evidently unsustainable, because any generation could do it at any time.

This concept can be trivially extended to all underfunded benefits. Maybe a shark raided retirement funds through legal smoke and mirrors but never got arrested. Maybe bankruptcy was abused multiple times to avoid paying workers, and that person not only didn't go to jail, but ended up a billionaire and president of the United States. You can see that this philosophy runs deep throughout our culture.

So I don't buy that pensions are underfunded because a company collapsed due to loss of market or whatever. It's more likely that the funds were raided the same way that congress has been writing IOUs for social security since the 80s. Somebody stole that money.

So I'd vote to pay down the national debt by raiding wealth created between 1980 and today. A high inheritance tax would do that. So would raising unearned income taxes (like capital gains) far above earned income tax.

Yes, these would slow the economy. But we're all cheating right now, living off the backs of future generations. Growth won't matter if gen X and millennials wake up and decide to throw a jubilee and cancel the national debt (my pie in the sky preference).

Don't have to cancel it... All that debt is in US dollars. Just print so much money that you have 20% inflation per year for four or five years. Problem will be fixed. It's a scam you can only pull off once (after that the dollar isn't going to be the world reserve currency anymore), but it's a scam you can pull off once.

Most of that debt is owned by Americans, who incidentally also own 393.3 million firearms - twice as much as every police force and military in the world combined[0]. I shudder to imagine what 100 million pissed off gun owners would do when they find out that there's going to be a 50% haircut to their life savings.

[0] http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/T-Briefing-Pap...

That's a cute thought but it will not work even once.

> The founding fathers warned against that, because if one generation offloads its debt to the next, then it effectively enslaves the next against its will (deprives it of property, and taxes it without representation, among other things).

Enslaved to whom? You can’t send your labour into the past. A huge national debt ‘run up’ by a previous generation just means that the next generation becomes more unequal, as the majority are taxed to fund interest payments to the heirs of the original bondholders. I don’t really see how this is more unjust than the existence of any other law or policy established before I was born, which I had no say in. If the solution is to appropriate the wealth of bondholders, the next generation will be equally able to implement that policy.

I believe it was Thomas Jefferson who was most opposed to intergenerational debt, because one generation could hoard wealth (mostly land at that time) and then future generations would be indebted to the dead, which goes against the spirit of liberty and justice in the United States:

https://jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/selected-documents/tho...

https://famguardian.org/Subjects/Politics/ThomasJefferson/je...

It basically comes down to: a child should not assume the debt of its parents in a free society. Some more info on the founding fathers' views:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/sponsored/alexander-hamilton-...

I'm generally left-leaning, but here are some articles from right-leaning publications for anyone fearing "fake news":

https://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/americas-d...

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/government-debt...

I agree with your sentiment though, that soon we'll have to make a choice as to whether to assume the debt of our parents or raid their assets to pay it down.

I also feel rather strongly that if children shouldn't inherit their parents' debt, then they also shouldn't inherit their wealth. The best way to accomplish that is a high inheritance tax. I know that people object to this as an impingement on liberty, but we have to also consider justice for the broader population (as I've written about in my previous comments).

And I also see your point that if we inherit infrastructure, we should also be ready to inherit debt (so that's perhaps not inherently unjust).

But I'd just like to also point out that I've never seen the federal government vote to raise taxes to pay for the national debt. The debt went down briefly under Bill Clinton, but that was mostly through reducing welfare expenditures (which arguably later backfired, as experienced by people whose benefits ran out during the Great Recession, among other things).

So I am also very skeptical that it will ever raid bondholders to pay for the debt, although that could explain the (cruel?) sentiment to destroy social security, medicare and medicaid to pay down the debt by republicans. Again, I am very skeptical that that would work, because prior experience indicates that they'll just give that money to the very wealthy and we'll still be left with a large national debt.

>I also feel rather strongly that if children shouldn't inherit their parents' debt, then they also shouldn't inherit their wealth. The best way to accomplish that is a high inheritance tax.

There's a slight problem with this idea: how do you deal with people giving each other money? People frequently "inherit" money from their parents before they're dead, sometimes long before. If parents pay for their kids' college tuition, do you want to tax that as "inheritance"? What if they set up a trust fund? What about the money parents pay while their kids are under 18 just for their living expenses? What if parents buy their adult children a house? With today's housing market, a lot of Millennials and GenZers can't afford decent housing right out of college, so sometimes their rich parents will buy a house for them.

So assuming you don't want to tax some 40-60 year old parents when they buy their 18-30yo kids a car or house or college, where do you draw the line? What if they're 70+ and they give their 40+ kids a big cash gift?

Finally, you're also assuming the parents die at an old age. What if the parents die young? What if the kids are still in college and don't really have any money of their own, and suddenly their middle-class parents die in a car crash? Do the kids now need to drop out of school and get on welfare or try to find a cashier job because all the parents' resources go to the state?

The only way I see a high inheritance tax not being really cruel, and also not being rejected by the voters, is if it only targets truly wealthy people. Jeff Bezos's kids don't really need to inherit all his billions if he gets hit by a bus. If an inheritance tax takes 95% of his wealth, leaving his kids with "only" tens or hundreds of millions each, that's far more than enough for them to live on for the rest of their lives. But taking that much from even upper-middle-class people won't really leave much for their kids. But with so much of the nation's wealth concentrated in the hands of a relative handful of people, I don't think it's really necessary to target anyone besides them.

>There's a slight problem with this idea: how do you deal with people giving each other money? People frequently "inherit" money from their parents before they're dead, sometimes long before. If parents pay for their kids' college tuition, do you want to tax that as "inheritance"? What if they set up a trust fund? What about the money parents pay while their kids are under 18 just for their living expenses? What if parents buy their adult children a house? With today's housing market, a lot of Millennials and GenZers can't afford decent housing right out of college, so sometimes their rich parents will buy a house for them.

That's not a real problem with the idea of an inheritance tax. That an inheritance tax alone doesn't result in perfectly equitable wealth distribution doesn't mean there's any problem with it - it would certainly be more equitable than not having inheritance tax.

>The only way I see a high inheritance tax not being really cruel, and also not being rejected by the voters, is if it only targets truly wealthy people. Jeff Bezos's kids don't really need to inherit all his billions if he gets hit by a bus. If an inheritance tax takes 95% of his wealth

I actually think that's a class where a high inheritance tax would be most problematic. Do we want the government to suddenly gain controlling interests in Amazon or Google or any other massive private enterprise?

>I actually think that's a class where a high inheritance tax would be most problematic. Do we want the government to suddenly gain controlling interests in Amazon or Google or any other massive private enterprise?

Absolutely, yes! The whole point of a publicly-traded corporation is that the company is owned by lots of different people, not just one person. If one person owns most of the stock in a company that large, then they're doing something wrong. Having a high inheritance tax for billionaires would be good this way, by making them think twice about hoarding all that stock.

With a normal huge corporation in this scenario, it would take a bunch of people all dying at once for the government to suddenly gain a controlling interest. I'm not sure about Amazon, but I'm pretty sure Google is not more than 50% owned by one person.

>That an inheritance tax alone doesn't result in perfectly equitable wealth distribution doesn't mean there's any problem with it - it would certainly be more equitable than not having inheritance tax.

I don't see how it's really equitable at all, unless you restrict it to truly wealthy people, so that you avoid family dynasties from happening and continuing for generations. For middle-class people (who these days really do not have that much wealth), I don't see how this benefits society at all.

Also, you never addressed my question about how you handle gifts. This is typically how extremely wealthy people get around a lot of inheritance tax today. (Remember, we do have an inheritance tax now, and it only applies to multimillionaires IIRC. And they typically get around it with trusts, giving it to their kids before they die, etc.)

There's already a gift tax, though it currently excludes the first few million given.

All good points, so I'm not really sure.

Honestly.. my first instinct would be to reform our tax system so that all income is treated equally by way of tax brackets. So small gifts under about $10,000 wouldn't be taxed much, but the rate would scale pretty quickly so that $100,000 might be taxed at 30% or something. I'd also vote to restore the pre-Reagan top marginal tax rates so that $1 million would be taxed at 50-90%.

And actually now that I write this out, that might all be sort of how it works now. Except that tax brackets have only been adjusted for inflation, not things like the wage stagnation since 2000 or the exponential rise in housing costs:

https://www.thebalance.com/irs-announces-tax-brackets-and-in...

Also, capital gains is a flat (regressive) tax, and social security taxes (also flat) top out at an income of $132,900. If those were placed under progressive income tax brackets with no cap, I think many of these problems would go away.

At that point I'd be concerned about increased government spending. So we'd probably also need a hiatus on new expenditures for some number of years, or until certain metrics are met, like the national debt being paid down by some amount. Realistically though, the world is too complex for that kind of absolutism to actually work unfortunately.

I realize that this would be an inconvenience for middle class families trying to send their kids to college, etc. But if you look at the big picture, an increase in upper class taxes (especially inheritance tax) could pretty drastically lower everyone's tax bill. People would have way more money for gifts, and that money would recirculate more in the economy (the opposite of trickle-down economics).

>Also, capital gains is a flat (regressive) tax, and social security taxes (also flat) top out at an income of $132,900. If those were placed under progressive income tax brackets with no cap, I think many of these problems would go away.

This I think is an excellent point. So many wealthy people make far, far more than the SS cap; forcing them to pay more into the system would certainly shore it up a lot. And capital gains should be taxed no less than regular income, if not more since it's passive.

This kind of over-generalization based on "generations" is nonsense. I'm technically "a Gen X" (although I haven't developed a bitter "just so" worldview based on having been shafted by the different age group with all the baddies in it) and have got a personal pension that I've paid into.

my parents got a free education (with a living allowance), mortgage tax relief on their mortgage payments, a pension based on their final salary, and a state pension that is growing about twice as fast as unemployment benefits.

The free education stopped as the last boomer quit university. The mortgage relief stopped as the last boomer paid off their mortgage. The pension was roughly equal to unemployment benefits until the first boomers retired. It's not coincidence.

It could also be correlation without causation. Moneyed interests love to depower the working poor - using a generational boundary coinciding with the grotesque expansion of corporate autonomy and authority over society minimizes the risk of a social upset while you ransack society and normalize poverty in the future generations.

Despite all the rhetoric to the contrary "boomers" are not a hive mind of universally conservative tech illiterate bitter resentful retirees who want to destroy the planet. In the same way Milennials are not some collective unified anti-capitalist anti-authoritation avocado toast pot huffing borg collective, people act in self interest and often irrationally so. Few are operating on substantial let alone complete information. Before you look at systemic societal change and pin it on a subconscious predisposition of millions you might want to look at those informed and empowered to cause such change without the cooperation of a disparate group representing almost a hundred million persons. Those with power and authority have long learned optimized techniques to divert culture and society towards their own ends and have been machinating such policy for centuries.

If you are paying more for education, housing, and getting paid less there is probably someone swimming in a Scrooge McDuck money pit on the weekends that with intent wanted that outcome to happen and aligned vast capital resources in participation with the capital resources of thousands of other plutocrats to see it done. The Fox News obsessed obese retiree blaming immigrants for all ills while being jealous of youth and a life unfulfilled is not organized or educated enough to affect national economic and political forces to inflict their will. But the millionaire boss at their last employer with close ties to all levels of government and the executives of all other corporations in their market certainly is.

We need class consciousness in opposition to power seeking to exploit and abuse. I don't expect those of older generations to embrace it - they have vested interests in defending the status quo and are thus erected as the vanguard of the moneyed interests that both make them miserable and make them feel safe and secure in their station. They are not an ally, but they are not the enemy - they are a symptom and victim of systematized propaganda meant to turn them against their own self interest.

I'm not blaming the boomers, it's not their fault that politicians pander to the demographic group with the most votes.

It does suck for those of us who aren't in that demographic, though.

> my parents got a free education (with a living allowance)

Pell grants get pretty close depending on the school and how poor your family is

> mortgage tax relief on their mortgage payments

Still exists.

> a pension based on their final salary

Social security still exists (for now)

> a state pension that is growing about twice as fast as unemployment benefits

If you decide to work for the State this is still the case - especially in safety jobs.

In the UK, everyone got free tuition and a living costs grants. The grant ended in 1988, and the free tuition ended in the early 2000's.

In the UK, mortgage tax relief stopped around the mid-90's (can't remember the exact year off-hand, but I think it was '97). The average boomer was about 45 in this year, and had finished paying off the bulk of their mortgage because of the housing boom around that time.

In the UK, Final Salary pensions stopped being a thing for everyone except civil servants in the 80's, when it started dawning on everyone what a huge liability a guaranteed pension is (see TFA for details). Even the civil service has mostly stopped doing them, I believe (and of course they've outsourced vast numbers of previously civil service jobs to private contractors who don't even provide pensions).

Its a bit more complex but you can see how OP has a point if you look at countries with a state mandated pension system, Germany for example. While I dont think blame will get us anywhere, the idea that the last generation leaves us a pension system that might have some similarities to a snowball system is hard to argue with, especially if there is no political will to fix this. The last big debate ended with the government making no changes and declaring that pensions is safe till at least 2030. Which is not really that big of a trust boost for someone who is planing to retire a lot later. Not even mentioning for how many its clear that they will get a pension on or under the level of welfare. So despite the knowledge, that me getting a pension from the pension system is lets say unsure, i will keep paying the the pension of the last generation who will be entering their retirement in the knowledge that the system is broken and unsustainable.

We dont have a generation conflict yet, but if the government keeps ignoring the issue in the hope of it becoming the next generations problem there will be one. Looking at the debate on climate change, where the question what the current generation 50+ is leaving us behind, I hope we will be talking about pensions as well.

It often is and can be, but since when it comes to "pensions" we are specifically referring to periods of time and demographics, it can be relevant. Although when the bad stuff will happen may or may not align with any particular definition of the generations in question.

It's interesting that "Millenials got shafted". When I went to college in the 1980's, it was much cheaper than now - I admit that. I lived in a very small dorm room with 4 guys in it and one bathroom on a whole floor of dorm rooms. I worked part time during the school year and full time during the summer to pay for it. I had no car, no TV and only ate food the school provided via my meal plan.

I now work for a large public university. Let's compare. Most students don't have jobs at all. Most students live in high end apartments (lots of these apartments cost more than my mortgage payment for my 4 bedroom house - per person). These students visit the town restaurants quite often and we have bars that are overflowing on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights with college students. When I've asked how this happens, I'm told that college loans let you pay for room and board so they happily get the most expensive housing possible because it's "free". Almost all students have cars and lots of them have a "parking ticket budget" so have no problems parking illegally and paying for it. It's also "free" because of their student loan.

Who is shafting whom?

> Most students don't have jobs at all.

Citation needed. 40% of undergrads work at least 30 hours/week[1] so I'm willing to wager that the majority of them have some sort of job.

> Most students live in high end apartments (lots of these apartments cost more than my mortgage payment for my 4 bedroom house - per person)

Where are you living that rents are so high but property is so cheap? Or did you buy a long time ago? And again do you have a citation for "most" (which is defined as > 50%)? The data says most undergrads still live in college-owned housing.[2]

> When I've asked how this happens, I'm told that college loans let you pay for room and board so they happily get the most expensive housing possible because it's "free". Almost all students have cars and lots of them have a "parking ticket budget" so have no problems parking illegally and paying for it. It's also "free" because of their student loan.

There's a term for these people: "financially illiterate". They have always existed and will continue to exist. Do you have any evidence that there are more of them now?

Anecdotes are not data. Your personal observations don't invalidate reality.

1. https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/workinglearners/

2. https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/most-on-campus

Here, here. Rich people and financially irresponsible people have existed forever. OP probably thinks people on welfare drive Cadillacs too. Also, I can't get over how OP talks about students not using school services (dorm/chow hall). They didn't at my school because it was a terrible value. You paid upwards of $10 for shit food, and more in rent than off campus. The only people that used the dorms more than they had to were forced by their parents, or were able to get it for free.

You make good points, but they would be better delivered without the mild personal attacks.

You can stop thinking about all the auxiliary stuff you mentioned, and just compare, for example, the ratio of tuition : minimum wage from your college education and a contemporary one.

That's what the students of the day are doing. Education is so expensive so I might as well live great while doing it. An extra $10K or $15K a year in living expenses on my loan is no big deal, right? That adds up when you need to start making payments on a loan that is ~$40K higher than it could have been.

Where are you getting this data? And FWIW it’s not unreasonable to pay 10-15k for shitty housing annually if you study in a city. What do you expect them to do? Go back in time and buy a nice home for 60k?

My father went to college in the 80's and he owned a tv, a car, and went to bars occasionally. He paid for that by working. A large portion of my friends paid for similar lifestyle by working in the mid 2000's.

You might be comparing your especially frugal college experience to a different one.

But tuition has been the college expense that has sky rocketed and made it difficult/impossible to pay your own way though college. My father paid around ~2,000 for tuition, my little sister would pay close to ~11,000 to go the same college which comes close to doubling the total cost of attending college.

I am a recent large public university grad. In my freshman year I lived in a very small dorm room with 4 folks in it and one bathroom on the whole floor. This was mandatory to attend the university. Everyone I knew worked part time during the school year and either worked full time to pursued REU (Research experience for undergrad) or others. Since my campus is only really manageable via driving, most people owned really, really cheap cars. I'm talking at least one person in my friend group getting in a car accident every winter because no one could afford winter tires type stuff. No one owned a TV and several couldn't afford the meal plan so they went without food and had to beg friends with meal plans to get them some food that day.

All of them are heavily in debt. Several dropped out because they couldn't afford it anymore, even with loans.

Whose anecdata is correct?

It's been a while since I was in college, but I got through mostly with loans, and also some part-time and intern work, but college costs were also lower back then. The loans only went so far; it wasn't an unlimited source of funds, so I still had to be judicious in how I spent it, so I had roommates most of the time, for instance, even though I would have preferred not to.

As for your public university, I really have to wonder why these poor students went there, as it sounds like a pretty terrible school. What kind of public university is only manageable via driving? I went to 2 different, very large, state universities, and both were quite manageable with walking or biking. I biked at both so I could get around faster. Even in America's car culture, both these schools were definitely not set up for driving to class; they had parking lots at the edges of campus, which were frequently overcrowded, and you still had to walk a long way to class, so it made more sense to avoid this unless you were a non-traditional student. Dorms were most certainly within walking distance of everything (though again, biking was faster, though not for everyone). The meal plans however were expensive and a rip-off, though at my freshman/sophomore school it was optional so I didn't bother, and got food from other places for less money. Anyway, maybe these kids should have chosen a better university, namely one that doesn't require a car. Cars are very expensive to own and maintain when you're poor, and college students don't usually have the tools or knowledge (or time!) to save money by doing their own work. That one thing alone probably would have made all the difference for your friends who dropped out due to finances.

"What kind of public university is only manageable via driving?"

If you wanted groceries there was a 1/week bus that did it, and if you wanted to be exposed to anywhere off campus you'd have to drive. There were often arts, research, etc. events that would require driving.

"I really have to wonder why these poor students went there"

Because they could afford it(the tuition was low comparatively) and it's relatively well known with a good reputation.

"That one thing alone probably would have made all the difference for your friends who dropped out due to finances."

It wouldn't have, sorry, we were a super afforable school at around ~15k/semester. At that point owning a car is chump change.

> It wouldn't have, sorry, we were a super afforable school at around ~15k/semester.

What state has universities charging that much for residents?

Many of them. It's the tuition + fees/books/supplies + mandatory dorms/meal plans, and if not dorms/meal plans then rent/food/car/etc.

> tuition + fees/books/supplies

This is normally what I consider the cost of a university.

> mandatory dorms/meal plans, and if not dorms/meal plans then rent/food/car/etc

That's not fair to lump in, because all of that needs to be paid for just to exist. While I don't like the trend towards mandatory on-campus housing and meals, you still have to live somewhere and eat something, so I don't really think tacking the entire cost of those into the cost of a university is fair.

I don't think it's unfair at all. Not everyone needs a place to live: some college students just live at home for free. I had some friends like that when I went to a major state university; they just commuted from home. They certainly didn't need to pay for a dorm or a meal plan because they lived off-campus, and luckily that school had no requirement to do so. Personally, I think they missed out on some of the "college experience" doing so, but still, I can't deny it was a lot cheaper for them.

On top of that, if living in a dorm and eating crappy cafeteria food is much more expensive than living off-campus in an apartment and getting your own food from a grocery store, I think it's fair to include those mandatory costs into the "cost of a university".

> What kind of public university is only manageable via driving?

Tons of them. Cars are not that expensive to own either. You keep bringing up dorms, yet they were an absolutely terrible value at my school. The car is way more necessary when you have to live off campus.

Not necessarily. I lived off-campus in two different universities, and while I had a car, I definitely didn't need it, and only used it for fun on weekends. My apartments were always close enough to walk or bike to school. This isn't uncommon at universities, especially in college towns.

Cars certainly can be expensive to own. If they're newer, there's a significant car payment associated. College students are young, so insurance costs are very high (esp. if they're male). And if the car is older, it may be cheap, but it's a big gamble: what happens when it suddenly needs expensive repairs? Even a relatively crappy car is a major expense (as a portion of their entire cost-of-living) for a college student, at least it was when I was a student.

People buy winter tires? I couldn't agree more strongly with the rest of your comment. There were a few people that made horrible financial decisions, and others that didn't work. In fairness, it almost makes sense not to in some cases, because minimum wage barely covers rent, so it wouldn't make a dent; better to avoid derailing your education. Also, everyone owns a TV now (even then usually). I have no idea what OPs talking about.

>I lived in a very small dorm room with 4 guys in it and one bathroom on a whole floor of dorm rooms.

This pretty much still exists at many unis. Dorm housing was absurdly overpriced, which is why many schools required it. Unless you had a good reason, the dorms were a suckers bet.

> I worked part time during the school year and full time during the summer to pay for it.

This is very common

> I had no car, no TV and only ate food the school provided via my meal plan.

How are you supposed to hold down a job without a car in this day and age? People didn't use the meal plan because it was a terrible value. Going to a restaurant was cheaper.

> Most students don't have jobs at all.

According to you. Have you looked at data then vs. now? Also, you can barely even pull in enough to make rent, so what's the point? It doesn't make a dent.

> Most students live in high end apartments (lots of these apartments cost more than my mortgage payment for my 4 bedroom house - per person).

WTF are you talking about? Maybe at your university. I lived in a death trap @$180/month with a sketchy landlord I almost had to fight once. I'd hardly met anyone that lived somewhere nice. Maybe one or two, that would concede it was a nice thing, and a bit of a splurge, but they weren't paying that much anyway.

Your whole comment reads like someone that thinks people on welfare are living high on the hog and eating lobster.

EDIT: Added some stuff about how terrible a value college room and board is.

I'm sorry I don't believe you. My experience (as of 6 years ago) had been that I see students having part time jobs which aren't enough to cover much of anything other than food, partially rent, and occasional going out.

There were of course wealthy students who did all the things you talked about: going out, trips, expensive trips etc. but by no means were they the majority.

It's probably confirmation bias. Luxury college student housing definitely exists, but it's for rich Americans and rich foreigners.

The maximum you can get in Federal undergraduate student loans as a dependent freshman is $5.5k / year. If you go over that you have to get private student loans, and most people don't get private loans. 92% of student loans are Federal and the remainder are private. https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/student-loans/student-... Nobody is going to be able to afford a luxury apartment plus tuition on that a year.

It's worth noting that many students get supplemental loans, and some do use it to bolster their lifestyle. I have a friend that never worked, and got no help from his parents. He did splurge for slightly nicer housing, but it was reasonable (~$400/mo vs $250-350). However there were other people that bought TVs with it. Never heard anything about luxury college housing, unless your parents were loaded.

You see a couple of rich trust fund kids enjoying dad-given amenities and ignore all the poorer students not doing any of the things that you listed. I shared an attic with someone and slept on the floor because there was no room for a bed. And I went to a rich private school.

Also how many unis are there in the US? You work for all of them and know what "most" students live like?

Most importantly, even if what you said is true, what's an extra $5k a year to eat out and drink on top of your $150k tuition loans? The screwing has already been done.

I worked full time during summers (making over x4 minimum wage), TA'd during three semesters, went to a CC for the first two years, a state school for the second half. I lived with roommates for $500/mo for a year then with my parents for a the rest. At the end I still came out with $15k in dept.

That's getting shafted. For me it's fine because I had a career easily lined up. I don't see how the average person isn't getting hosed now though.

A bad loan is actually a disaster for both parties. The borrower gets indentured for life and the lender loses a bunch of money.

Except that student loan debt can't be discharged in bankruptcy. These ultra risky loans are being extended precisely because the government essentially removed all of the risk.

And what makes it even more appalling is that you still have to pay interest. A zero risk investment should have zero return.

the vast debts incurred by the US education system are a new thing for this generation.

But I was mostly speaking of my experience in the UK, where the boomers paid no tuition fees and got a grant to cover living expenses. GenX generally paid no or little fees. Millenials are being saddled with more and more cost.

> high end apartments (lots of these apartments cost more than my mortgage payment for my 4 bedroom house - per person)

You mean rent is high, not that the service they get is good I think. Sharing rooms should not draw you 1000$ a month in a dorm.

I have a cousin that used took the max for his college loans and then whatever he had left after tuition he used for trips to Japan, Europe, etc every summer and lots of fancy restaurants and clothes. College loans are insane right now.

>Boomers got their education for free

I've never heard this before. Got a link that explains it? All I've heard from the few boomers I've talked to is that they generally worked during school and had some loans as well.

“Free” is only slightly hyperbolic. My mother went to the University of Washington for her undergraduate studies in the 50s/60s and paid $25/credit for classes. She covered that, easily, by working part-time. No loans.

Yes, my dad was able to pay his entire way through university (tuition, housing, food, etc.) just with the money he made working part time at the university cafeteria

This is what happened in the UK, tuition was free until fees were introduced at the tail end of GenX (quickly abolished in Scotland, more or less). I don’t think it was ever “free” in the US but until recently (GenX again?) it could be covered by a summer job in many cases. Obviously now it is absolutely bonkers in the US, and as it stands the more elite universities in England, Wales and NI are rapidly headed in that direction.

not only tuition. In the UK, students got a grant to cover living expenses as well as free tuition. This ended in 1988 (incidentally the year I went to university), to be replaced with student loans. Boomers are the generation born from 1940-1965, so the youngest boomers turned 23 when the student grant system finished in '88. Exactly the age when a person in a four-year course (and a gap year) finishes university. It's not a coincidence.

Great point!

They didn’t get their education for free but compared to what people pay now it might as well be free. When boomers say they worked to pay for their education, they mean they took summer jobs washing dishes or waiting tables.

Try to do that today and you’d be washing dishes for the rest of your life and never pay off the student loans.

It's compounded by some people not adjusting for inflation. Education was still expensive back then, just not as expensive as it is now. It was also far less universal.

edit: "people" -> "some people"

edit 2:

Trying to reduce a complex situation quickly (so forgive oversimplification): for decades college education was a bargain, the lifetime value of a college degree (average increase in wages) was much higher than the cost of the degree. Ignoring the ethics and rationales for this, price rose to meet demand. At the same time, automation has reduced the number of jobs and the value of a college degree. It is an awful situation.

What I was trying to get across, using real numbers, is that Harvard tuition in 1960 was apparently $1500. Inflation figures would tell you that is 8x higher ($12k, affordable but still not cheap) in today's dollars. Actual tuition is $46k. But an average house was $12k in 1960 and so you'd expect $100k today on the same inflation rate. But it's $300k.

What you also have is an illustration of the stratification of society (lower/upper middle class gap) where "luxuries" like college, a house, or a car are tracking higher income growth and lower income growth is stagnating because of international and technological trade trends. This is well beyond the scope of this submission, so I'll cut myself off here except to say reducing this to "boomers" isn't helpful.

You’re right that it was less common to go to University but the rise in tuition has outpaced wages by an insane margin.

Edit: Apparently Wikipedia has an image that demonstrates this really nicely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_tuition_in_the_United_...

People are adjusting for inflation, but the rate of inflation on education has increased significantly without a stepwise increase in income or value from that education.

My dad payed his entire way through college with a part time cafeteria job and graduated with no debt. My tuition was over $50,000 a year and housing, fees, etc. was over $20,000. Even adjusting for inflation, he went to college for a tiny percentage of what it cost me

Housing and education have increased at 3-4x times inflation. Which is why you could pay tuition with a summer job, but now there is no way to do so.

no,in the UK, students got a grant from the government to cover living expenses. This was replaced by the current student loans system in 1988

I'm at the tail end of the boomer generation (although I prefer to think of myself as men-x). When I left school only about 7% of my cohort went to university. Most of us didn't get a free university education, we didn't get any university education.

https://www.aarp.org/content/dam/aarp/ppi/2019/05/a-look-at-... (AARP: A Look at College Costs across Generations)

My parents, and their parents, and all their university peers, got grants to cover all living expenses, and paid absolutely no tuition fees. That's more than free - they were basically paid a wage to be there! None of them worked as far as I know - it was seen as full-time education.

Boomer here.

An exercise for those who wonder: look at historical tuition + fees costs and the minimum wage at that time. As I recall, a summer of 40 hours per week at minimum would more than cover tuition at the University of Virginia in 1970.

So, no, the education wasn't free. But it was a lot more affordable.

It'd be the case for anyone in the UK where fees for education are relatively new. I'm making an assumption about the poster though. I paid a tiny amount in 1999 in the UK, but fees increased significantly since then. Your response is how I understand it to have been here in the US, but I suspect that the rate of inflation in the education market is much higher now than what "boomers" had to deal with. That doesn't change that they had to work during school or take on loans, but it did change their long-term outlook.

Another boomer here. I worked half-time throughout my undergrad and grad years, and full-time during the summer. Even then, I don't think I reached net worth zero until my late 30s or so. (This is with a solid tech degree.)

Well, I went to university in the UK in the 1980s and my education there for 4 years was completely free: fees were paid and I got a fairly decent grant.

I did work during the summer but focused on academic work (and other things...) outside of that.

In the UK, I'm ""genx"" and part of the last English (+) generation to both receive a student grant and not pay any fees, for a course 1997-2000.

(+) the Scottish system is separate and still subsidised

If not free, a fraction of what we pay now. I think it used to cost a few thousand for a degree, not the hundreds of thousands that some people have for a philosophy degree.

In NL they actually got enough money to live on while studying. I still got money while studying in the 90s too.

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