Don’t worry. The insurance companies and doctors will get the rest anyways. We have a whole system of parasites to make sure that no generational wealth gets passed along.
Necropost at this point but yup, the only ‘stable’ sector of the US economy is … healthcare.
(I would say ‘and the military industrial complex’, but uh suprusingly no to that, most of those major players are mired in scandals and major fuckups that seriously threaten their solvency and credibility)
After the AI bubble pops, the American economy will essentially be primarily a gigantic, extractive, hospice care economy.
You know, Death Panels, run by AI/LLMs, the exact nightmare scenario that all the Boomers were told would result from any attempt to meaningfully reform the healthcare system.
And most of those healthcare workers will be braindead Gen Alphas that literally can’t read, but managed to get some kind of nursing certificate at a degree mill.
It’s hospitals not doctors. Doctors get all that money only when they run their own private practice, and life support rooms are all in big hospitals, so the money is distributed between insurance and hospital management, and doctors get paid like all other skilled workers, and probably less than scuba diving welders.
Yeah, my parents told me once that when my grandparents pass away there was a nice chunk of money that would be coming. I never planned around it or anything. Some time after they passed I was a little curious about it and asked what happened, that was pretty much what they said, that it probably had all been used up by hospital and nursing home bills. End of life care is the last chance to suck up that dough, I guess.
My mom got money from her grandparents, almost half a mil. She told her own mother to just spend it all now (&on her) because they could file title 9 anyway, so mine as well enjoy it.
I too never planned on getting anything anyway. They hate all us children its bizarre.
File title 9? How does sex discrimination feature into this?
Not a day goes by where I thank whatever creator out there that I wasn’t born in the USA.
We in the USA have a pretty good standard of living, but holy fuck the government is unwilling to pass any consumer protections. Just let the corps fuck us because they’re the ones making political donations.
The US government used to pass consumer protections, worker protections, environmental protections, etc. to the point of being a leader in many ways for other parts of the world.
And then Reagan happened.
Yup, but Reagan just opened the gates. Several other presidents have followed his lead.
I would thunk a good portion of you have a good standard of living but quite possibly a majority basically live in 3rd world poverty conditions and constant debt, stress, and exposure to violence.
There’s just enough Americans living in decent to good conditions to make it look like the American dream is alive, since the cameras don’t focus on the less fortunate.
I’ve traveled all over and have seen the poverty of South America and Africa first hand. I would much rather be poor in America than there.
I live in Canada and we have pretty good standards of living here. Up to and including not going financially bankrupt if we get sick or injured.
My partner broke their leg last year. Between the 6-8 hospital visits, xrays, two casts, and an air boot, we paid a grand total of around $120. Less than $20 for paid parking (I’m lazy and it was like $2 a day) and $100 for the boot of which I got $85 from my work insurance. Everything else was completely covered by our provincial care.
We’re about to have our second child. I’m dreading finding out what we’re gonna pay.
I absolutely hate that for you…
Ugh, lucky. My friend is even getting Canadian citizenship now thanks to a recent law change there and his grandmother being a Canadian citizen.
I welcome them to my wonderful country and I hope they have a wonderful life here!
Marry me, PhoenixDog, so I can into Canada
My partner and I (we’re poly) literally have an an agreement that if we ever divorce, it’s to marry someone else to help them move here.
Well I just called dibs, so… And Lemmy comments are legally binding, of course.
More like the nursing homes.
My observation is that doctors are getting squeezed, other staff moreso. They’re getting pushed harder and harder for more and more productivity out of them.
A doctor in my family quit and retired early because (basically) their group got more corporate and burned him out. I heard of a dentist who quit over ethics issues once their group was acquired by private equity.
Not that they aren’t well off, but I’d be careful blaming working professionals like doctors, engineers and such so much.
The doctors aren’t the direct problem, just complicit in the evil money scam that is American healthcare.
Sure they aren’t directly to blame, but so long as they “just do their jobs” they are knowingly and willfully complicit and need to be held accountable as such.
A dentist that does non-necessary procedures, like filing cabinets or pre-emptive fillings, causes harm.
A doctor that delays or prevents life-saving procedures because insurance tells them to causes death.
An engineer who doesn’t question “why does this licence plate reader need to have facial recognition?” causes fascism.
A dentist that does non-necessary procedures, like filing cabinets or pre-emptive fillings, causes harm.
I agree. I’ll do my own filing cabinets and he can stick to dentistry.
What you describe is exactly why the dentist got fired once a VC bought out the region, and partly why the doctor burned out.
They are questioning.
And why they are no longer professionals and how you know the ones that are still working are not questioning.
I’m a huge fan of not passing along any substantial generational wealth. Above certain threshold - I’ll give it 15 times of country’s median annual income - it only serves to accumulate wealth.
Not accumulating generational wealth is only viable in a world where social services provide for everyone.
Very much agreed, but still - no hard limits in terms of heritage only supports a class of parasitic elite.
I was interested to see how the numbers would play out for this idea
According to https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/median-household-income-by-state the median household income for a single person is $41,382 in the United States. 15 times that would be $620,730
According to https://wealthvieu.com/average-inheritance/#average-and-median-inheritance 92% of inheritances would be well underneath this amount
Assuming that your limit was meant to apply to individual recipients and not to the entire estate, this seems like a pretty modest proposal to me.
I’m sorry but biting into that particular number was rather counterproductive, as it was arbitrary - make it 50 if you care, but my point still stands. Armed elite’s successors are the armed elite still, but we can counter that. It would still leave them with funds to afford some very comfortable living, just no longer enough to terrorize the world.
I’m sorry if it came off that way, but I was not trying to be critical of your idea at all - I was trying to see how many people would be impacted, and I think you could easily get away with limiting the amount of inheritance even further.
I think being a worker gives a person perspective that is critical to their development, and no one should inherit or be given enough money that they never have to do any work in their life.
Not only does unrestricted inheritance directly cause the development of a disconnected wealthy class, but it’s also bad for the people who inherit too much.
Very true. You have to spend down in order for Medicaid to pay everything.
I see the issue here less as “the kids get nothing” and more a concern at where they money ends up.
Houses get massively inflated over time… Older parents sell, but the money all ends up at some retirement home. Retirement homes are owned by a bunch of hedge funds and/or rich folk. Staff at these places often aren’t paid particularly well either.
The end result is still higher prices for everyone else, while the rich folk get richer as everything rises into unaffordabilty.
I also see it as a problem of the economy. Their kid, will never be able to afford that house. He will never be able to live in a house like that again. He also got royally screwed.
Home ownership is a luxury. Reality is being stuck renting. Renting is preventing upwards mobility.
I keep reading about how the boomers are going to be the biggest wealth transfer in history when they die, but all I’m hearing about in practice is boomers selling their assets and spending the money.
Well technically, the wealth is being transferred…
Transferred, and concentrated
Or having it taken to pay for medical care and whatnot if they don’t.
Everything else has gone up. The home being sold is going to be taxed, they’ll buy a condo someplace in a retirement community, and maybe they go in a nursing home or assisted living that will make sure to take every last dime in the old person’s account.
Correct, spending the money. So, the game is to own companies where the boomers will spend money.
We all get to play one final game of Catch with our parents.
That’s because the “me” generation turned out to be total pieces of shit. Who would’ve guessed when they got that moniker AND had to be reminded nightly they had children to keep track of by the local news.
Id just count my blessings that my parents can take care of themselves in retirement and beyond and not have to count on family to come in and take care of them, which is an unfortunate truth for a lot of families in the states.
I dont expect shit, and it almost seems morally bankrupt to expect a generational handout. You get something or you dont, thats life.
I agree it’s a blessing to have your parents be financially independent into their later years. I do think there’s a generational disparity. I don’t think there’s an obligation for parents to pass on some early inheritance, but I just can’t imagine letting my kids face a lower standard of living assuming their career paths and lifestyles were similar. It’s not their fault our leaders and elite have designed a system that reducing the quality of housing and cities while making them more expensive (IMO).
Maybe I’ll feel different when I’m older and I think everything they do is wasteful or something?
I can agree to most of that.
To clarify, what’s morally decrepit is someone passing judgement on an expectation thats the result of distilling down the richness and complexity of a relationship to something transactional and material, so devoid of empathy and compassion.
The truth is that the OP meme is meant to point out how a kid is being slighted because there MAY not be a transfer of wealth. We have no idea how wealthy the parents are, whether they are spite spending it, whether they didnt have retirement saved up and couldn’t afford the house and viewed it as their retirement. I agree that it’s admirable to want to and then to actually leave wealth to your children. But the expectation is repugnant.
I think we’re on the same page because I was more replying to you than the OP. I think the meme is a bit extreme and that was either the joke, or it’s specifically crafted to piss of both sides of the aisle, like so much content today.
I agree with your point with the corollary that if they make that choice, they had better not come knocking on my door if they run into trouble.
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Neither of my parents have any kind of savings at all, they basically only ever made enough to get by. My mom gets a very meager stipend from being a teacher. They both retired this past year and are drawing social security. It’s already really tight for them. I know when they get older I’m gonna have to sell their houses to make sure they have enough money to live on and the medical care they deserve. No idea where they will live at that point. Isn’t America great? Work hard your whole life to struggle to make it when you’re too old to work…
I’m in the process of doing this for my teacher mother with dementia. It’s a fucking nightmare.
I live with my parent, Iv not had much luck in life job wise so I work min wage job and help my parents so they never end up in a home. Thankfully my girlfriend understand why I’m doing this so I don’t have to stress about that.
Will have to do the same in a couple of years. Both parents are retired but my dad got cancer about 10 years before his retirement, so he basically didn’t have an income during that time. They are now unable to move since they are both too old, so it’s going to be me and my brother handling that when the time comes.
People expect an inheritance? I ain’t getting shit, I’m not going to feel bad for someone who has been counting on someone to just hand them something.
My dad is 60 now and always said he’d leave some money for my siblings and I. Luckily he also simultaneously raised us to not rely on other people and to plan your life as best you can. He developed dementia and needs to be under 24/7 care. It costs $8,000 a month. At this rate he’ll more than likely have enough to cover his care costs until he passes and I’m thankful as fuck everyday he has that money. I don’t give a fuck if I see one cent just as long as he has enough for himself. I’ve never let myself think it was ever going to be mine.
My dad is 65, and told me when I was 17 (when he had millions of dollars) “I can’t take it with me and ain’t leaving it to you.”
My dad is the ultimate boomer, has had everything handed to him and he got ahead in life by help, from parents, wife’s, and mother and laws. But acts like he did it all on his own. Also he the type that gets pissed if his children get ahead of him in life or don’t rely on him. Like my brother has done. He has zero friends and cares little of other people unless they are doing something for him. He also loves that we are destroying the planet (yes he believes in climate change) he rational that by saying he wants the world to end when he dies. Totally doesn’t want to leave nothing to future generations. Trump same way, why my father likes him.
My mom and dad got Long Term Care Insurance a long time ago. My dad passed away before he could collect on it, but my mom is currently getting around $13,000 a month from it and this goes up by 5% per year, so she can afford to live pretty much wherever she wants for the rest of her life. Naturally enough, insurance companies do not offer this kind of policy any more.
You’re a good kid. I’ve seen some people get really pissed off about losing “their money” like that and forcing the person to live with them or avoiding caring for them to save the money until they pass so they still get “their inheritance”.
Not expect necessarily but it’s not crazy to think that a couple who made a relatively easy financial decision 30+ years ago would want their kid to benefit in the current climate when the world is much worse.
Sure but to just expect and be counting on a windfall as the potential recipient is setting yourself up for disappointment.
I’m an only child. My parents are in their late 60s. When they sell their lakefront house they’ll make over $2 million. They have a will that says I get pretty much everything, with certain assets that go to my cousins (We’re a rather small family overall).
Unless something catastrophic happens, I’m not seeing that any time soon. They’re both very healthy people. But they helped my partner and I move across the country and buy a homestead a number of years ago.
While I am not expecting a substantial amount of money being transferred into my bank account, they’re helping in other ways.
It probably helps that I don’t live in the USA where if anything medical did happen they’d be sucked dry. And I thank God every day for that.
Shit, my married partner and I are working on getting them (my partner) gender affirming surgeries set up, which both surgeries are 100% covered by our provincial healthcare. It’ll cost us gas money and that’s it. Maybe private parking for like $20 or something.
My wife’s grandmother owned 3 houses and over a million in savings from some good stock market investments. She worked at Costco for like 30 years. Her two children are really shitty trashy people and were fighting over the inheritance.
When grandmother said she plans to give money to her grandchildren (my wife and my wife’s sister), there was a lot of resentment. My wife said, “We don’t want it. Spend the money on your retirement.” And she’s out living her life on a cruise.
I’ll be expecting an inheritance some day, but I will refuse it. I grew up with strict parents. Don’t get me wrong, they’re not bad, they’re just idiots and were strict for the sake of being strict. At least they expressed regret at how they have parented my siblings and I.
Although I appreciate providing us with material security, they did not let us be ourselves and to stand on our own two feet. I developed a psychological response not to accept anything from them that I might deem substantial on a silver platter as an act of rebellion. I even refused their attempts to match me up with any girls they considered. It is for me claiming my own agency, which includes refusing their inheritance. Besides, I have started investing and live within my means. So, I am confident that I could build my own proverbial nest on my own.
Hence why being able to bankrupt two casinos is quite the achievement.
3 casinos actually and either 5 or 6 bankruptcies between them.
I inherited a house, and it is ruining me. I say bullet dodged.
How is the inherited house ruining you? Does it need repair?
How?
Unless it’s a mobile home on leased land, or you live somewhere property, and land aren’t valued as assets.
You can always sell it …
Taxes, maintenance, upkeep, utilities etc. Legally, I can’t sell it for some time as that is part of the will.
Can you take out debt against it to pay for those things? If you’re net negative while it’s in your possession then the math should work out if you can extract some of its future sale price against its current cost.
I am currently looking at options like this, yeah.
Sounds like it’s a problem with inheritance. Not owning a home.
Which is relevant to the meme that was posted.
You said the house was ruining you but that’s not true. What’s ruining you is the condition of the contract you accepted in order to obtain said house. The meme is about selfish parents pulling the ladder up. Not conditions set on an individual that is subject to them alone.
I never stated that the house is ruining me.
I said:
I inherited a house, and it is ruining me
The meme is about pulling up the ladder behind them.
You got a ladder installed and they bolted it to your house.
People buy houses all the time they can’t afford. Hidden costs, thinking taxes and insurance won’t shoot up, depending on the size might cost and arm and a leg to heat/cool.
There’s even a term called “house poor” when you buy a house but don’t have the money to furnish it so you just have big empty rooms.
My mother owns a house and I’d be fucked if I inherited it. Just the property taxes, insurance and utility bills for it come to over $30K a year which is more than I even make (before income tax) as a school bus driver. Selling it would require a lot of repairs first which I couldn’t afford. In theory you can sell the house for its book value less the cost of these repairs, but in my township you’re legally required to fix some things before a sale can even be approved (e.g. replacement of the entire sewer line out to the street). I could maybe rent it, but typical rents here would barely cover the expenses even assuming the tenant doesn’t trash the place.
I’d mortgage part of it to repair it, then sell. That way you’d walk out with the rest of the money.
Yeah, it’s one thing if it’s in a nice location and well maintained…
But good chance it’s got some serious issues because they haven’t fixed anything in decades and no one wants to live there, so you might be 50k in the hole for things before you can even show it to serious prospects…
Or take the hit and sell it as-is to some crappy company that will probably underpay by 200-400k dollars, even accounting for all the “repairs” (probably just blast everything with paint and hope to sell it to some sucker that doesn’t take the potential problems seriously).
They’d make it a rental property more than likely. These companies are buying up homes in general to do that.
Idk. Grandparents owned a really nice home I had fond memories of. They actually didn’t sell it, they lost it. Turns out if you just pay the mortgage by remortgaging the property multiple times that maybe isn’t a good idea. Place had serious issues, but I would have tried to buy it, had I the money at the time, before it went up for auction. Property alone was worth quite a bit due to the neighborhood. Most properties in that neighborhood now go for 1-2 mil.
It’s a class war, not a generational war. Every generation has shitty people in it.
My parents received a lot o financial support in order to afford to buy an apartment for our family.
Neither my sister, nor myself has received similar financial support to buy a place to live in.
My parents instead live in a gigantic place they don’t use fully, and own several houses and apartments they rent out for profit. Of course none the real estate they own is anywhere near myself or my sister’s family. They also love to go on fancy expensive vacations all the time and complain about the younger generations. Of course they also get pensions from the companies they used to work for. Something that just doesn’t exist anymore.
There’s a lot of overlap between generational and class war.
But this is your personal experience. There are a shit ton of boomers that are amazing and give their kids hand ups. It’s the system that is broken. Weren’t the proud boys mostly millennials? They were probably living off their parents. Gen Xers are never really shit on anymore because there isn’t enough of them to give an opinion. I can say though, there are a fucking ton of shitty gen xers too.
It’s a class war that built this system, not a generational war.
Sure the system is broken and my experience is anecdotal.
There’s a generational war if you want to call it that. Birthdates fell below replacement rates starting over the last 60 years in European countries. At the same time life expectancy increased significantly. In European countries with state run health care and pensions this has a huge impact.
So now you have lots of boomers that retired early, own real estate, receive government retirement benefits, company or government pension, healthcare, etc.
At the same time there are a big number of immigrants, who cost the state more than they contribute. On top of that the quality of infrastructure and state services keeps decreasing.
Gen X and Millenials are the workforce, who are forced to pay for all of that. Stagnant wages, high taxes, worse government services, worse healthcare, etc. All of it was caused by boomers, their life choices, and political votes.
Boomers still occupy the most powerful positions in the state, other institutions, NGOs, corporations, political parties, etc. Gen X only starts getting there.
The whole demographic crisis was known for decades. However retirees are the biggest voting block. In the end we have an alliance between retirees, capital, welfare recipients, and the state against the productive working population.
proud boys
The success of the populist right is directly caused by the decades of failures by institutions run by boomers and the policies they have voted for.
It’s a class war that built this system, not a generational war.
Class war accelerated the generational war.
So, are Millennials going to be viewed the same way?
It won’t be happening any where near as often with millennials children, because millennials don’t have any where near the generational prosperity that boomers did. As has been posted many times in this thread:
Good times make weak men. Weak men make hard times. (The world is here.) Hard times make strong men. Strong men make good times.
I’m fairly sure I won’t be making any good times, or any children as a Millennial. I might not even live much longer, thanks to a system designed to fuck over people like me specificaly.
I agree, It’s just the time line of things.
It is wild how selfish people can be though. That same time line over the last 50 years, saw a lot of rapid change both social, technological, and economic. Makes sense why there exsists such a rift.
It can be both. Some generations have a higher percentage of shitty people. The obscenely wealthy have always been shitty. AND Boomer’s grew up in circumstances where they were able to get/do whatever they wanted. Now the only way to do that is to shit all over their children. The Boomer’s parents sacrificed a lot to give them a better life without having to worry about how they got there. The Boomers in turn believe they deserve and are entitled to everything they want and their children can fend for themselves.
Yeah, the problem is that one generation keeps shitting on the others.
OK boomer
(/s)
I refused offers to emigrate years ago, the people trying to sell me the idea think I’m better off there… use my brains for the money.
Now, looking at what’s going on, I think my hunches were right, but nonetheless each day I watch the horror continuing to unfold in America.
You couldn’t pay me enough money to ever move to the USA.
A lot of people thought the USA has just descended into fascism. No, it hasn’t, it’s been fascist for a while. We were just nicer to white people for a while longer.
i’m leaving everything to kids. if she needs help it’s up to them
We really gotta implement a land value tax.
An important thing to consider if we have any chance at shifting the trajectory of shelter insecurity (abolishing property would be better but we can do taxes way more easily). One thing I’d be worried about is any elderly people who wouldn’t be able to afford to pay the property tax to live in their own home. This happens all the time already, and god knows most of them don’t live in a place where property tax raises proportionately to the land value, and we should consider why that’s a problem.
The elderly are already in a massive blindspot in popular pro-socialized healthcare discourses, and even “developed” healthcare systems struggle to find support and housing for people as they age. If we start using these sorts of indirect eviction tactics as a means of transferring wealth to the younger middle class via affordable property ownership, many of those people will straight up be displaced into deadly living conditions. I can imagine how this sort of system would make us more vulnerable to the state as we ourselves aged.
Policies like these could easily be used to divert attention from other socialized programs and services that could be improved in a way that generates greater material security more generally, but whose effects would be less immediately apparent to the kinds of people who could even afford an inexpensive house.
I agree that the elderly are often overlooked in this discussion since so much of the housing discourse revolves around boomers that own property and outright dismissing the fact that a large contingent of them are rolling right into infirmity with just about no retirement.
I think nursing homes are going to have to function differently in the coming years to accommodate this, and it’s not going to be easy. Breaking apart the current health"care" bureaucracy will free up a lot of medical staff to practice actual medicine rather than just push insurance paperwork, but the lack of people overall will require leveraging of technology to fill the gap. Technology that is currently being used to burn up our aging infrastructure for the benefit of the Epstein class.
The next few years are going to be filled with grueling work just to ensure we don’t have collapse of social order.
Add the tax but use some of the money to build a shit ton of government housing like the UK did after WWII. Their housing problems only started after they stopped building subsidized housing and started relying on the market (lots of other factors, too, but there is a strong correlation on the timing here).
Yes, that is what I’m saying. When I say that this idea of a property tax that is oriented toward increased property value exclusively runs the risk of satisfying more affluent young middle-class people who are really just expressing aggrieved entitlement to the way of life that their parents and grandparents enjoyed.
A common liberal tactic to disarm broader wealth distribution and social welfare movements is to satiate an element of their criticisms for a substantially powerful group within that movement. Think about how the New Deal disproportionately benefitted white labourers and effectively dissuaded broader socialist and anticapitalist sentiments that had grown in the previous decades, or how queer marriage rights afforded security to property-owning gay men who are now the most conservative-voting queer demographic.
That there is such a risk of victimizing vulnerable elderly people, a group that has BTW been increasingly devalued since COVID started, means that if this policy satisfies enough voters specifically – which is to say suburbanites – it could effectively disarm the accompanying reforms that recognize the interlinked issues of shelter unaffordability and insecurity, healthcare services, education, and food insecurity while simultaneously normalizing policies that disproportionately harm specific groups. Programs exactly like what you referenced here were eroded by those same means, and the luxury of suburban home ownership itself was an immenseley effective tactic in disarming labour unions in the mid-twentieth-century US.
Rather than setting up a reliable inheritance structure, my Silent Gen parents set my brother and me up as joint tenants. The reason, they told me, was “to make it hard to sell the house.” Well, my stepdad left the place a hoarder mess worthy of reality TV, and we still had very little trouble getting a decent chunk of change.
Yeah. Fuck the boomers. They destroyed everything.
this is culture war garbage, i imagine your working class boomer grand / parents are not to blame for the failing of the state.
this has been and always will be an issue stemming from class, economic structure and social stratification.
I’ll throw in an argument that a lot of that generation are either unable or unwilling to understand the plight of their offspring and why they don’t just do better. There is a lot of intra-generational sabotage amongst them as well. I would like to see numbers of men with successful retirement to women, especially given the power disparities in that generation, early on in particular. There’s a lot of not undeserved angst for them, but a lot of them were also screwed over the by rich and those who pretend they are.
