Not a problem unless you were counting on collecting social security
this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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I don't know if I plan on being around that long
You could withhold your taxes but doing that would be too large an action for most Americans.
If growth doesn't compensate for shrinking working population, you'll be fucked. Somone has to work so you have your retirement.
Why not make billionaires an illegal thing. Poof! You have money for retirement for everyone
Money isn't the issue in the end, the issue is that you still need enough people in working age so that you can use the money to get the goods and services that you need as a retiree.
If a large number of people retire without finding any young successor, services just become more and more inaccessible. Like e.g. if there are not enough doctors in your area because many of them retired, you won't get treatment even with money, because the capacity just isn't enough anymore to treat everybody. If a car shop closes down because the mechanic retires, you cannot get your car repaired there any longer, even with a lot of money, and so on..
An old society means that the area decays, more and more places close down or cannot get maintained any longer. And money doesn't help because numbers in a bank account don't do the real work. There are already a few old regions around the globe where this can be seen
Finally somone who gets it. It's like economic 101 in school: Money is fundamentally worthless. It can only buy as much as the economy is able to produce
Become unfuckable.
Way ahead of you.
But what about the orphan grinder? Wont somebody think of the orphan grinder?
The machine needs cogs!
I can't think of anything more irresponsible and selfish than procreation in the 21st century. Why would anyone want to end their own life and subject themselves to the stress of ensuring their craft human survives and becomes a relatively average coal miner.
I'm not going to fault someone who has the means to provide for a child for making that choice. It's a very personal one, just as not having a child is.
Voting Republican.
Touché
I make it my personal responsibility in life to constantly bring up the necessity of immigration as the solution to age disparity and population decline. There are working people. There are as many as you could ever need, tens of millions, perhaps hundreds. It's never going to be an issue which can't be solved with immigration.
I don't see how this is a solution so much as delaying the problem for future generations to deal with. What happens when the countries the immigrants are coming from start to face the same issue (if it isn't happening for them already?) It's basically the population equivalent of the "one more lane bro" philosophy.
It is absolutely happening already. Many of those countries are experiencing issues with being below replacement and a hollowing out of their workforce at the same time. For many, they have gotten old before they got rich, which will make further advancements difficult.
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I am more than willing to fix the declining birth rates in every country but nobody is accepting my offers =/
The sperm bank would
Yay! Less humans to create less suffering!
Tax-funded retirement is fucked, but like, who still thinks they're having one.
All retirements will collapse not just public ones. It's called the asset meltdown hypothesis.
Old people aren't investments
Well, with that attitude probably not.
But think of billionaires' bottom lines!
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.
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.
Most countries have billionaires pulling strings at the top.
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