[jmyeet]

Transferring wealth from the young and poor to the old and wealthy is the entire purpose of our government.

This is now the endpoint we are bouldering towards: the bottom 90% increasingly have nothing left to steal or exploit. And just like an algal bloom that eventually runs out of oxygen and dies, this is where this system and our society unravels.

[cucumber3732842]

> the old and wealthy

The government will throw them under the bus in a heartbeat to keep power.

[jerlam]

The government would, except that they tend to vote in much greater numbers than other groups, so keeping them happy is important to stay in power.

[scoofy]

The success of the YIMBY movement is basically like watching this power shift happen in real time.

[therobots927]

*Transferring wealth from the poor to the rich

[scoofy]

No... we are specifically transferring it from the young. This is happening across the west. Once birth control was created, we kicked off a ticking time bomb of a crisis by not actually changing our social safety nets, with fewer young people paying to support an much larger number of older folks.

At the same time, our entire housing shortage is designed to enrich the homeowners by protecting the value of their property at the expense of the young who live with a zero-sum shortage, when previous generations could typically buy a home at, or near, the cost of construction.

We need to be honest that while yes, we are transferring wealth from the poor to the rich, we are also transferring wealth from the young to the old.

[jjav]

> fewer young people paying to support an much larger number of older folks

The largest generation by population in the US is Millenials, second largest in Gen Z.

https://www.populationpyramids.org/generations/united-states

[scoofy]

It's very obviously not the total number of people that matters. It's the difference in the number of people being funded and doing the funding. The math is fairly straightforward:

# of Boomers - Greatest Gen > Millennials - Boomers

This means that Millennials will have a greater burden than Boomers did. Which means Millennials will live with fewer resources.

[jjav]

I don't follow this comment at all, sorry.

Presumably you're comparing people of working age contributing to social security vs. people in retirement receiving social security. That age can vary but let's pick 65 as a typical retirement age.

Here's another data source:

https://theworlddata.com/us-population-by-age/

There are 205.7 million working age adults vs. 61.2 million of age 65 and older.

From where do you get the "fewer young people paying to support an much larger number of older folks"?

[scoofy]

>I don't follow this comment at all, sorry.

I worry that someone here who can't follow a simple a population delta mapping from one generation to another isn't exactly arguing in good faith.

>Presumably you're comparing people of working age contributing to social security vs. people in retirement receiving social security.

No, we are talking about the previous net contributors (vs receivers) -- that is Boomers vs Greatest Gen in the 1980s -- versus the current net contributors (vs receivers), e.g. Millennials vs Boomers now.

That number has gone down dramatically, and because of that, social security is effectively insolvent.

>Under the current structure, the Social Security Administration estimates that Social Security will pay full benefits until 2033, when it will be forced to reduce benefits by about 23%.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikepatton/2026/05/12/the-comin...

The reason why it's insolvent now is that the relative number of payment contributors to payment receivers has gone down dramatically. Today there are "fewer young people per old person" than there were in previous generations.

[cute_boi]

And because poor people don’t have much money, the government decided it could borrow heavily from future generations and give it to rich ppl, making them even poorer.