I’m well aware of the community I’m in. My support for reorganizing our society doesn’t change the facts of our current reality. And maybe I’m a cynic or a pessimist, but I don’t see developed nations shifting to degrowth until all us peons have been milked for ever last drop of energy we can muster. Even though we need to shift to a model that isn’t dependent on infinite growth, there is little likelihood that will happen in the remainder of my lifetime.
Well, yes. Families have been getting smaller. This means there’s a smaller pool of people to support the fund and ensure that the money in the fund grows. If the money in the fund does not grow then the people currently in retirement lose value on their contributions, or in other words, get less out of the fund than what they put in. So young people have to pay more into the fund because there aren’t enough of us to support all the boomers at previous rates. Millennials, GenZ, GenA, all fucked.
And I want to be clear: I’m not saying that the CPP is worse than the alternative. Having a ton of seniors homeless due to being unable to work would cost everyone a lot more than the CPP does. All I’m saying is that it’s unfair that my contributions will not fund my retirement because they’re currently funding someone else’s. Especially when I could really use that money right now to, yknow, afford food with actual nutritional value.
And all the more: this is a time bomb waiting to blow. The CPP is only projected to be sustainable for the next 75 years. When GenA is retired, they won’t be able to rely on it. It’s a robbing Pete to pay Paul sort of situation.
Can’t even say “eat the rich” anymore because most of them are old and stringy.
I mean, it might not be a threat to humanity but it’s certainly a threat to my ability to retire. Right now the money I put into CPP is funding the boomers’ current retirement and their children’s retirement. Who’s gonna fund mine? But it’s not like my generation could have kids anyway. The same boomers fucked the world so badly that we’re only barely able to scrape by. I’m in my 20s, I shouldn’t even have to worry about this bullshit.
Forget baby Hitler, if I had a time machine I’d kill baby Reagan.
What could be a viable alternative for medical applications? Plastics have improved the sterility of medical environments immensely. Sure, we don’t need plastic pop bottles or shopping bags, but how do we phase out plastic in the medical field without reducing sterility?
And then we’ll find that all the stress that we’ve gone through due to poor planning and policy has taken 10 years off our lives and we’ll all have heart attacks at 70 before we even get to retire. Those that survive will be kept on life support to continue being worker drones for the billionaires. Changing the age of retirement isn’t the solution. And if they do decide to do that, then it makes it all the more important that they enact policy to make life easier right now.