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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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The people on social security at this point had decades to vote and make sure that the country was properly contributing to that social safety net. Instead they gutted it and allowed it to become hollow. Now they can suffer the consequences of their actions, or lack thereof.
That assumes that anyone can reliably be a single issue voter their whole life, and that people somehow only have to live in the reality they voted for instead of the reality of whichever politicians actually won.
It's a very beguiling idea to simply blame the current problems of the world on negligence or a lack of effort by those who came before you. On strictly personal failings. It's also incredibly short sighted to do so, and often leads to repeated mistakes.
Inb4 "then they should have tried harder to convince their friends/family! They should have protested! They should have stormed the capital in violent revolution!" Keep moving the goalposts so long as you can keep blaming the previous generations.
It's a classic trap in business for newly hired managers: Come into a new to you situation, pick out the obvious as hell problems, insist upon the most logically simple solution. Ignore the history, company politics, confounding variables, and end up making the situation worse because you never understood how things got so bad to begin with.
In complicated situations, it is a trap to think that the obvious solution just hasn't been tried or investigated because no one as smart as you has been involved yet.
Now blame where blame is absolutely due. There's plenty to go around.
That said, very little of what the powers that be do is truly new. Blaming the older generations eliminates an opportunity for us all to learn from the past, identify patterns in history, and just makes it that much easier to keep us all oppressed.
A big takeaway I've found from elderly family members is that you absolutely cannot rely on inflation increasing at a standard pace. A fortune saved up 25+ years ago does not go anywhere as far as it used to.
Anyway, to try and cut my ramble short: We can sit around feeling smug about some perverted idea of "what goes around comes around", or we can try to learn from the knowledge aand mistakes of previous generations.
We'll all be old one day.
This is exactly a problem of negligence. SS isn’t a fucking tree. It doesn’t just grow naturally. We have to put money into it and maintain that system, and not drain the coffers when we want to go bomb brown people in far away lands. When that system has been in place for decades and then someone doesn’t maintain it before me (I’m only 30 so I’ve only contributed about 12 years of my life to SS) but boomers worked for 40-50 years and kept trying to stop paying into it or taking from it, then they caused the problems. It’s not short sighted to call them out since they have had the most amount of time and have been the largest group of both voting and working blocks.
SS is going to fail or be dried up by the time I hit 60 since we keep running into issues with it. At best those of us under 45 will have to figure out a new solution and rework the system so that we can pay for the failure and misgivings of those before us. You can try and sit on a high horse about not wanting to blame the older generations, but they’re literally the ones with the voting power and money to make this all work smoothly and they didn’t do shit. If you’re younger like me then you too will be paying for their fuck up. You can’t live off the knowledge you gained from realizing too late that the older generations fucked us. We cant eat knowledge, we can’t live in learning from past mistakes, and we can’t drink the warm idea of knowing we sat around and problem solved as a team.
You've missed my point entirely.
Blame absolutely is fair, but people can't vote on just the best options for SS alone, ignoring everything else. Also, as seen in recent presidential races (cough cough 2016), you can have a massive contigent of voter will just effectively erased by very thin margins or technicalities. On top of all that, voters can't directly effect what the policy makers actually do in office.
My point is, it's not useful to blame such a wide and diverse swath of people. Painting with such wide brush strokes only serves to create an us vs them situation that distracts from the actual policy makers, lobbyists, and news media complex with far more direct influence over all of this. Most of those people are boomers, but all boomers are not part of those groups.
The shortsightedness is thinking that new generations are the first people to go "Hey, maybe we need to pay into SS for enough money to be there. Maybe we shouldn't waste money on proxy wars on false pretenses." plenty of Boomers were shouting this from the rooftops as this shit was happening. Your objections and concerns are not new.
Basically, please stop talking about boomers as some singular homogenous entity. Please stop thinking that the situation we now find ourselves in is caused by some sort of lack of sense from older generations instead of politicians doing what is best for them at the expense of the general populace. Please stop blaming the average populace from before your time for the choices made by politicians.
Trump should be a burning hot example that politicians actions and the peoples' will are often very disconnected.
We do have to find a way to fix this. Taking time to dunk on people just as downtrodden as us is wasted effort that could be put towards trying to fix things.