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.
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.
Hence why being able to bankrupt two casinos is quite the achievement.
3 casinos actually and either 5 or 6 bankruptcies between them.
The parents job of providing is up until either 18 or 21 if college is involved, get your own house after that entitled little fucks 😅
Maybe in traditional american culture. The rest of the world cares about the family at every stage.
Yes American culture values independence but most other cultures are interdependent. There’s pros and cons to both. In many interdependent societies, kids stay with parents until marriage which helps keep costs low and allows kids to save or focus on career. But parents can also be extremely overprotective over kids (ex. helicopter parents) and keep kids from pursuing new things or risky endeavors (ex. family gaslighting you for trying something different bc it goes against their worldview).
Guess you’ll not have any housing anymore that isn’t owned by a landlord. Hope your swept up in any fallout from your failure of a country.
“And that’s why dad went into the cheap retirement home and doesn’t live with us.”
So glad I never wanted family in this clown world.
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.
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.
i’m leaving everything to kids. if she needs help it’s up to them
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.
Millennials: “We’re not entitled”
Also millennials
You do realize that generational wealth has been a thing forever right? You’re not making some amazing gotcha point here.
I’m not trying too.
But I think I have.
I mean, here you are thinking you’re entitled to every penny and asset of your parents
God forbid parents do better than the bare minimum when committing to one of the biggest decisions in a human beings life.
I live in Denmark and the saying here goes 'if there is anything left for the family when I die, then ive miscalculated ’
In the US the financial times have been so bad for decades that, without assistance, education and having a house are directly correlated with family wealth.
I’m not defending the shit–it fucking sucks.
My brother made an investment portfolio to my nieces because, as he said he’ll leave nothing alse to them lol they are 3
Why do the Dutch bury their dead face down?
So they can park their bicycles.
Petah?
Butt cheeks
Respect
Det finns inga fickor i svepningen.
Here’s the story of the house we bought last year - which took us 6 years to find.
My wife and I had been looking for a nice house in our area. We moved here just before the pandemic and we knew the prices around here, and they were within our reach at the time.
Then the pandemic happened, house prices went through the roof and never went down.
On top of that, our village in particular tends to be gentrifying at supersonic speed: this used to be an isolated village, but the big city nearby is expanding, so now it’s turned into a fashionable place to live that’s not too far from the city: the lake is now managed, so it’s not a putrid mosquito-invested swamp anymore, we have two supermarkets, solid bus service… Wealthy folks buy old houses here, tear them down and build new, super-expensive mansions on top of what is now prime land.
Before the pandemic, houses here were still affordable(-ish). Nowadays, it’s minimum 3x as much for the cheapest old house (to destroy and rebuild anew, remember!), which are getting rare, and new ones are running into half-million territory.
So we had been watching for houses in the area like hawks on the various local realty sites for 6 years, not holding much hope for this village, but still including it in our search, because why not.
And one day, this house turned up at a surprisingly low price - the one we’re in now. Long story short: it was so poorly advertised by the realtor that nobody bid on it. But I knew it because I had seen it before while riding my bike in that street, so we bid immediately and we scored it.
It’s one of the last old houses, but it’s in perfect condition for its age, because the previous owner was in the construction industry and built it to the most modern standards of the time. And it’s located in one of the most highly sought-after streets in the village, with direct access to the lake, gobs of land, and located 200 yards from the stores and the bus stop.
Our house is insanely great and we got it for cheaper than pre-pandemic prices!
Why you ask? How does something this lucky happens?
Because the previous owner, a nice little old lady, sold it for cheap because she got tired of her children bickering over who would inherit it after she dies, how much profit they would make if they sold it, and trying to move their mom to a retirement home so one of them could move in early, or convince her to sell it now so they wouldn’t pay the tax on property inheritance.
The lady literally told them “Fuck the whole lot of you!” She put the house up for sale at bargain-basement price in order to sell it and move out as quickly as possible, so none of her kids would get anything at all after she’s dead.
And that’s how we got to live in this increasingly posh neighborhood without really having the kind of money to belong here 🙂
Good for her.
If those were my kids I would kindly tell them not to contact me again.
The lady literally told them “Fuck the whole lot of you!” She put the house up for sale at bargain-basement price in order to sell it and move out as quickly as possible, so none of her kids would get anything at all after she’s dead.
legend. I’d have her over on christmas every year.
We invited her - not just for Christmas. She doesn’t want to come because this whole affair was a heartache for her, and she misses her old house enormously. We maintain good relationships but we don’t push her.
Please chrish that old woman in stead of her supposed children
For me it was the other way round sadly. We lived in a house (rented) in a city district that was basically dubbed “the little cozy village right in the city”. We had the prospect of buy this house one day for quite cheap, but then the gentrification happened very fast before we could do that. There were many old houses in that area - often times so old, that the only real way to deal with them was to tear them down and rebuild. Even those were sold at sky high prices. Don’t even think to stay below 800k to 1M. And that before all the additional construction needed. Since this price hike only took about ~1 year to reach this point, we hadn’t really time to realize what was going on. We even got a very good offer to buy the house, but with all repairs and such needed, we’d have still been on the hook for an estimated ~900k total.
We bought our house (20 years ago) from a 95 year old lady. Her family was trying to get her into a home for years and finally convinced her. They put the house on the market at the price the came up with when they first started talking about moving her so the price was about $80k out of date. I guess the family got really pissed at the agent because we bought it the second it got listed and they thought they should have got way more money. So we got lucky too. Except our house is a bit of a shit box and had lots of stuff wrong with it. It had cardboard plumbing for fucksakes.
From wiki:
Orangeburg pipe (also known as “fiber conduit”, “bituminous fiber pipe” or “Bermico” or “sand pipe”) is bituminized fiber pipe used in the United States. It is made from layers of ground wood pulp fibers and asbestos fibres compressed with and bound by a water resistant adhesive then impregnated with liquefied coal tar pitch
Oof, that sounds like it was a fun project to remediate
I understand that the old lady was in some sort of emotional frenzy but odd that she didn’t sell the house for its market value, it would have sold quickly anyway. And good thing (I guess) one of her kids didn’t swoop in and buy it at the low price she listed it for. 🤔
Yeah it was weird. I bought it for the under the price of the land alone. I think her idea was to buy herself another place somewhere with the money (which she did) and leave her kids skint.
And I don’t think she would have agreed to sell it to one of them - not to mention the family feud that would have ensued if one of them had tried.
Here’s how this is actually gonna work, at a broad social scale:
With some rare exceptions, the Boomers will sell their homes to pay for medical expenses, and die alone, in either old folks homes, hospitals, or much smaller homes/apartments, or if they’re very lucky, homeless or in a concentration camp for the homeless.
They’ll have to sell their homes because private equity/credit is imploding, and all their pensions and 401ks are ultimately based on that, even if they say they’re not.
And home prices are crashing because:
1 younger generations don’t get paid enough;
2 climate change costs are finally coming due via insurance now actually reflecting climate risks + outsized proportion of the last ~2 decades of new homes being built in high climate risk areas;
3 property tax rates are skyrocketing due to decades of local government mismanagement of budgets and infrastructure.
A fun fact that people do not like to acknowledge is that while yes, big Wall Street investors do largely set the tone and tenor of the housing market, the vast, vast majority of homes are owned by small time “mom and pop” landlords.
And the majority of existing home sales are Boomers selling homes to other Boomers.
They did this to themselves (and to everyone else), and the result will be that they impoverished their children while chastising them for being poor, enriched faceless corporations while claiming they hate them, destroyed the climate while claiming climate change isn’t real… all while claiming that everyone else is entitled, poorly informed about how the world works, and financially irresponsible.
and die alone,
I doubt it. Every time I’ve made a thread or comment suggesting those who can cut out their MAGA relatives, people start screaming bloody murder.
They make dumbfuck claims like that I’m “spreading hate” or “trying to break up families in trying times”. Simple fact is that you may love your MAGA relatives, but they sure as fuck don’t love you. Its actually indisputable.
Your average Joe sane person has FAR more in common with those your MAGA relatives knowingly and gleefully voted to kill in 2024, than they do with their MAGA relatives.
Your MAGA relatives want you dead too, but they don’t know it because they assume you’ll change to their side when you’re older. That, or they’re too fucking stupid to understand the death penalty they voted for millions to get applies to you too.
Yet still, even as these Nazi fucks gleefully support the massacre of Iranians who are just like you and me, these supposed leftists cry and vomit and scream about the mere concept that they shouldn’t remain close to their fascist relatives. Its honestly insanely pathetic as fuck. If people can’t cut out Nazis, then no boomer dies alone because they are the bulk of MAGA.
I don’t understand how historically every generation has strived to make the world a better place for their children with the exception of boomers. The greatest generation set them up for so much success, and they’ve done nothing but try to destroy everything for the kids that are coming after them. I’m Gen X and my biggest focus is trying to create something for my children, to have something to pass on to them, to save for their college so that they don’t have to struggle like I did, and to leave them with a better world than the one I got handed.
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times,” - G. Michael Hoof
The quote is men, but I believe it should be generations.
I heard one that goes “the first generation studies war so the next generation can study math so the next generation can study art” Then I guess the art pisses so many people off they go to war.
Or they fail the entrance exam to art school and restart the cycle.
Pretty sure that’s just that one guy, or is this a trend?
A significant number of current day fascists… Ben Shapiro, Donald Trump, Steven Crowder…
They all wanted to be movie stars, script writers, actors, etc.
This is actually a broad trend, that some failed artists develop a megalomaniacal drive to ‘be respected’ in some kind of way, and that way is ‘being a fascist’.
Honestly, you can see the same broad authoritarian personality traits in a much larger subset of artists who basically cannot accept criticism… more often then not they just end up as lolcows, or that one insufferably snooty person you know.
Hard times make hard men, hard men make soft times, soft times make soft men, and soft men make me hard.
They weren’t called the “me generation” for nothing!
The Boomers somehow think they are the strong men, while in reality they are the weak men that were created by the good times, aka the most anamalously prosperous sustained economic boom in the history of the planet.
(Well maybe possibly with the exception of what China has managed in the last ~40 years, but then we get into a very complex discussion)
At risk of playing too hard into the GenX trope: You should be more outspoken about this, and not allow yourself to be ignored.
That’s what happens when you give a human being everything. You actually need to be born and live through hardship in order to develop empathy.
This is why rich people are consistently sociopaths, with racial theories, and the like.
So… does that mean I’ll be able to buy a house someday after all?
Found Aquaman
FUCKIN AQUAMAN???
Buy? Maybe. Squat in a ruin? Absolutely
… I attempted to write a serious answer to this but basically I got overwhelmed, waaay too complex to attempt to project … 60 years into the future.
So, instead:
‘Outlook cloudy, ask again later.’
Maybe this csn help you make up your own answer:
I am an ‘out of the labor force’ econometrician, not unemployed, out of the labor force, because I’ve been unemployed so long that I have realized that I am now unhireable in the field, and thus gave up trying to find a relevant job.
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.
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.
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.
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.
More like the nursing homes.
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.
This is part of how wealth concentrates in countries without a welfare state. The property market becomes more and more unavailable for young people, and older people have to sell their homes to afford proper care.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I interpreted this as “we’re selling the house and burning the money in voyages, cruises, fuck fest, etc”.
That’s how it starts but most people have no idea how much end-of-life care can cost, or even just regular geriatric medicine.
I just assume that’s where any money i have left is going to end up. Luckily i don’t have anyone relying on the funds i possessed, but I also don’t expect to have much (if any) anyway. I’m kinda relieved i don’t have children for that reason, tbh. It’s hard enough to make ends meet as it is. As much as i might have enjoyed starting a family, I’m afraid I’d be setting up another generation to suffer through the naivete of mine…then having little/nothing to offer on my way out!
I’m planning on my end-of-life being real cheap. I’d prefer a clean exit over a long decline, especially if I start losing my faculties. (Not much history of dementia in my family, thankfully)
Even in countries with a welfare state system. Mainly because we depend so much on the USA and they just carelessly plays monopoly with the world economy (2008 crash plus subsequent “quantitative easing” is why we have high apartment prices). I just hope we can decouple before everything that is happening now will affect us too much.
The US empire is going down, fast. Countries that don’t decouple now will go down with it
The problem is systemic with the world. Pretend like any country is better and you’ve lost the point. It isn’t nations or races that made this problem. It’s wealth. The elite class is the problem and they are the same problem in every country.
Completely agree - the US empire has never worked for the US people, but global capital, which moved to the US as the British empire fell.
Genx here. Expect nothing and they can’t disappoint
Now this hits too close to home!
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Debt generally isn’t something you can inherit, what happened ?
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I’m not in the US. There are plenty of places where it is not standard within the law, but i did state “generally” to cover all bases
Tl:dr: don’t trip over your dick trying to play the “assumptive american” card when it wasn’t called for.
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I’ll be honest, you’re looking for excuses to pick fights now. And not even decent ones.
Then why bring it up in the first place?
I asked a friendly question. You responded irrationally. And now you’re again trying to slam me by…slagging off my penis size? Mate, i’m a cisfemale, you have fuck all luck there lol
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Everything ive read about in the states would indicate that unless you consigned or agreed to something, that debt is not yours. The problem is it doesnt stop the debtors from lying to people, and once you engage or make a payment, you do accept responsibility, as fucked as that is.
Yeah, but the assumption there is that folk assume I’m in the states.
There are literally more than three other countries.
But yes, outside of the law, that’s a surprisingly common practice everywhere.
Tell your Mother’s dealer that debt isn’t inheritable and see how you get on.
for about ten years I been saying, have no expectations and you cant be dissapointed.
It works more or less
