What’s the alternative? Pensions? If your retirement is dependent on a pension, and the pension goes belly up, then you’re left with a fraction of what you planned for (since PGBC doesn’t cover it all)
So what is the alternative? Is there one? If you want to eat a steak, either you slaughter the cow yourself, or someone else makes more than they need and chooses to sell it to you. The way a retirement is funded might change whether someone with more than they need choose to sell it to you, but it isn't going to make steaks exist.
The only way to care for unproductive populations is to make personal sacrifices and care for them, at a loss/to the detriment of your own possible financial and lifestyle returns.
There's no way to beat a game by its own rules when the rules are set up specifically to allow certain parties to take advantage of the game. Apologies for sounding like a high school libertarian, but I can't think of any simpler way to say it than that.
Grandparents help raise the grand kids instead of day care and baby sitters. Kids take care of their aging parents. Communities pull together to help each other.
There are complexities to it, but without a lot of the artificial financial structures that we have in place (loans, insurance, stocks, government programs) that’s probably what society has to revert to and in many ways it’s the most efficient long term way for society to function.
Obviously this plan is made much easier by remote work and good earning potential for tech workers and I suppose some parents will be more attached to where they currently live than my mom is. But multi-generational is not outright impossible, I'd wager a significant chunk of the population could pull it off to varying degrees in one way or another.
Trylly modern thinking is, if the Market disagrees with Gravity, then Gravity is wrong.
And yeah social security is running a deficit and will have to reduce payments by a whole 25% or 30% in another 20 years... unless we just remove the payment caps. Wow.
Like at the end of the day the resources are present in american society to take care of the elderly in retirement. We are not physically running out of green bean casserole. It's just a question of allocation. At the end of the day the money needs to be allocated and just like day 1 of the social security program, there's going to be a lot of people who don't have time to pay into a system before drawing out. The resources will need to be allocated to pay for the wageslavery of the last 30 years.
Boomers are going to get theirs regardless, they will make sure of that, but, they're intent on pulling the ladder up behind them like they've done on every other major social issue.
Boomers don't care if Xers or Millenials don't have anything saved up, they got theirs and they got social security on top. But if things don't change, there's gonna be an awful lot of starving grandparents again when X and Millenials hit retirement, cause we don't and they're making sure we won't have social security either.
I have a lot of ideas about what could be done, but it's all armchair revolutionary theorizing.
In Germany, we have a "rollover system" - you pay a government-mandated fixed percentage of your income into pensions system in exchange for pension credits. The contributions from all current payers (plus a sizable chunk of tax money) are then distributed to current pension receivers, and the worth of a pension credit point ("Rentenpunkte") is regularly-ish adjusted for inflation.
And yet, we here don't really need private pension savings. It'd be interesting if someone with a better understanding of USSS could chime in for the reasons.