I don’t live in the US so mostly I’m thinking of who’s gonna pay for my retirement and healthcare when I’m old.
I’m paying for the current old people’s retirement and healthcare. That’s fine, it’s the social contract we have in our nation: everyone gets taken care of and those who can work, pay a lot of tax to make it happen. If the population decline gets bad enough, there will be no one to do the same for my generation.
Oh and they populist conservatives did a pension reform so you can take out whatever you’ve gathered in your second pillar even at age 20 if you want (at which point it’ll probably be in the hundreds of euros lol) and can’t resume payments (which were matched by the government - you pay 2, 4 or 6 percent and government pays 4% of your gross income) for 10 years. Worst deal ever for most people taking it out if they want to retire at one point. And a third of the population took it out. They now have to fully depend on the first pillar (government) pension, which isn’t based on past investments at all, it’s taken from the working population’s social taxes when you retire. So far more directly affected by the population decline. I’m betting they’ll eventually forcibly fuck it up for the rest of us to pay for the retirements of those who took it out.
The only real billionaires of my country are the founders of Wise and Bolt. They all made their money from startups that succeeded internationally and none of them particularly politically active. One of the Wise guys is actually building a car-free “five minute city” block in the capital. The biggest problem is a actually a guy with under 100 million net worth who runs a small bank (called bigbank, ironically), keeps donating to the conservatives and his individual contributions are like 10-20% of the entire country’s political donations put together or something. It’s like eroding LGBT rights is his life goal or something.
All that doesn’t change the fact that since the population is aging, rather than people of all ages dying off evenly at once, things will get harder to maintain, as everything we enjoy in life still requires someone to do work, regardless of economic system - and old people still require resources to maintain (and more labour to maintain than young people)
It does tend to happen that we’re pretty prejudiced, yes. Personally I’m not and most people I know aren’t either, but anyone who grew up in the soviet era is generally pretty racist towards people of color. It’ll take a few more decades for things to get better I’m afraid.
I don’t live in the US so mostly I’m thinking of who’s gonna pay for my retirement and healthcare when I’m old.
I’m paying for the current old people’s retirement and healthcare. That’s fine, it’s the social contract we have in our nation: everyone gets taken care of and those who can work, pay a lot of tax to make it happen. If the population decline gets bad enough, there will be no one to do the same for my generation.
Oh and they populist conservatives did a pension reform so you can take out whatever you’ve gathered in your second pillar even at age 20 if you want (at which point it’ll probably be in the hundreds of euros lol) and can’t resume payments (which were matched by the government - you pay 2, 4 or 6 percent and government pays 4% of your gross income) for 10 years. Worst deal ever for most people taking it out if they want to retire at one point. And a third of the population took it out. They now have to fully depend on the first pillar (government) pension, which isn’t based on past investments at all, it’s taken from the working population’s social taxes when you retire. So far more directly affected by the population decline. I’m betting they’ll eventually forcibly fuck it up for the rest of us to pay for the retirements of those who took it out.
Most countries have billionaires pulling strings at the top.
The only real billionaires of my country are the founders of Wise and Bolt. They all made their money from startups that succeeded internationally and none of them particularly politically active. One of the Wise guys is actually building a car-free “five minute city” block in the capital. The biggest problem is a actually a guy with under 100 million net worth who runs a small bank (called bigbank, ironically), keeps donating to the conservatives and his individual contributions are like 10-20% of the entire country’s political donations put together or something. It’s like eroding LGBT rights is his life goal or something.
All that doesn’t change the fact that since the population is aging, rather than people of all ages dying off evenly at once, things will get harder to maintain, as everything we enjoy in life still requires someone to do work, regardless of economic system - and old people still require resources to maintain (and more labour to maintain than young people)
You understand that money is a fiction, right? It’s not even numbers on a piece of paper anymore, it’s ones and zeroes.
Fewer people means more resources per person and less damage to the earth.
there are other humans in other countries that are looking for a better life
the problem is that countries with declining birth rates dont see them as humans
It does tend to happen that we’re pretty prejudiced, yes. Personally I’m not and most people I know aren’t either, but anyone who grew up in the soviet era is generally pretty racist towards people of color. It’ll take a few more decades for things to get better I’m afraid.