this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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[–] vexikron@lemmy.zip 18 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Such as retirement, in general.

Roughly a quarter of the population has a significantly negative net worth (more debt than assets) and another roughly quarter has a zero to slightly negative net worth.

Basically that means a quarter of people will have to survive off of Social Security alone, while making interest payments on their debt. There are not many parts of the country right now where anyone can actually rent an apartment or afford a mortgage payment off of SSI alone, so better hope you already own a home, or you are in a rent controlled apartment.

The significantly indebted quarter of people will basically have to sell everything they own and borrow money from friends and family while still having to make debt payments, all on only Social Security and then they /might/ be able to afford a crap apartment or a spot in an old folks home. Realistically a lot of them wont be able to pull this off and will try to move in with their children or go all in on an RV. Or just become homeless and die.

Oh. Right. Social Security is projected to go bankrupt in about 10 years. And the Republicans might manage to just eliminate it before then.

So uh yeah. The other roughly half of people either have stock market based retirement plans that are sufficient for some kind of actual retirement, or are basically financial try hards who have /some/ ability to comfortably retire based on stocks, but if the stock market does not go up forever, continuously, they will basically join the group of people with functionally zero net worth.

Probably about 70% of the people with any ability to possibly comfortably retire are in the -tenuous- category and 30% range from -confortable- to -have more net worth than many small countries-.

This -tenuous ability to traditionally retire- segment of people will ultimately betray any purported moral or ideological positions they claim to have had their whole lives and do basically anything to ensure that their retirement ability doesnt diminish or disappear, including any kind of austerity / public benefits cutting / tax lowering policy / legalize usury and debt based imprisonment or forced labor / type policy they can find to juice the stock market, which will further fuck over the already less well off group.

The actually well off will continue to laugh a the poors as they historically always have.

America: Fuck you, I got mine. Go off and die now.