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Comment by smeej | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps this is my cynicism showing, but it's the Boomers who caused this problem. Let them suffer the shortfall as the natural consequence.

They've been the political decision-makers most of their lives because there were so many more of them than their parents. And they can criticize Millennials for receiving (?!) participation trophies they handed out until their faces are as blue as their hair, but they've systematically screwed the economy to their benefit their entire lives.

If there aren't enough people in the workforce and wages aren't high enough for payroll taxes to pay more than 83% of their SS benefits, then let them only receive 83% of their SS benefits.

I'm all out of sympathy for their entitlement.

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It's not gonna be them, it's gonna be Gen X that gets the shaft on this one and probably millennials that raise the capital gains taxes on the old people when they finally age into leadership roles and the old people by that point will be Gen X again.

> Perhaps this is my cynicism showing, but it's the Boomers who caused this problem. Let them suffer the shortfall as the natural consequence.

If you want people out on the streets, that would probably be a good way to do it:

> Nearly half of senior citizens receive 50% or more of their income from Social Security. One in 5 people 65 or older gets 90% of their income from the program.

* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2024/05/is-social-security-...

There are a lot of poor Boomers out there, and SS is the only thing preventing them from being completely destitute.

Whose fault is that? Actions have consequences.

This is definitely the parentified child in me speaking, but I'm sick of being the adult to this generation of perpetual children, especially while being mocked by them the whole time for their actions.

Look at the stats about how inexpensive everything was back then relative to wages. If someone couldn't manage to save anything and succeed financially in that environment, compared to today's? They must not have been trying.

I recognize some people faced extenuating circumstances, but not HALF of people.

My dad's a perfect example. He complains that he prioritized "living for today" when he was young, but now it's tomorrow and he barely has a pot to piss in. But it's his own fault, and I would really like to see Boomers face that reality for the first time in their lives.

Quite a few of them will be dead by 2035. The earliest boomers were born in 1946, that’s 89 years old. They’ll have been collecting benefits for decades by then.

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