Insolvency and prohibitive costs aren’t a hypothetical but have already arrived when it comes to elder care. And it will get worse. Class warfare is a thing but it is not every thing.
You do understand that those who paid into it earlier get much more out of it, right? So it is a Ponzi in that sense. We can agree to call it something else, but Ponzi is much easier than typing out “a system whereby those who got in early are guaranteed gains while later cohorts risk actual losses due to insolvency as the early cohorts cash out.”
Nursing homes (Medicaid) costs about $12,000 per person a month national average iirc. Cost cutting by fiscal conservatives is clearly not the reason nursing homes can charge so much. If anything it’s the exact opposite: it’s a monopsony so the cost is effectively set by whatever Uncle Sam decides it can pay.
The problem is not really the per capita costs though, but that the demographic time bomb has arrived and all at once a huge portion of Americans will stop paying in and start pulling out of the system that I won’t call a Ponzi. Both parties are run by boomers who have catered to boomers because most voters and donors have been boomers. As a result our politicians have done an awful job “paying it forward.” If the health care and social security situation doesn’t make that clear enough to you, then consider how they’ve left housing for the future age cohorts. Laws like prop 13 have allowed the “early in” to amass great wealth and cash out while using nimby politics to prevent new building and using loosened immigration (eg h1b, migrant farm workers), international free trade deregulation and other policy levers to increase the demand and price for the real estate and other assets they hold. A lot of tax breaks for those who were able to buy homes early, but no so much benefit for people at the other end of the not calling it a Ponzi system we have. If you see only the political parties but not demographics or wealth distribution across interest groups within both parties then you have fallen for party propaganda, the lie that the party matters more than money and special interest.
I don’t disagree. But it’s also true that this will set precedent for future entitlement cuts. Younger people are not served by having entitlements treated as a sacred cow. I am in the opposite camp, cuts will and already have hurt me. I just wonder if maybe we should stop perpetuating a multi-generational Ponzi scheme that allows any generation with large enough numbers (eg baby boomers) to steal all the money from the cookie jar and spend it before anyone can figure out what the heck happened. Maybe that’s a problem with democracy more generally, but that it is a problem cannot be denied. If the dominant age cohort in power is over 85 they will have little incentive to worry about the budget ir nation beyond 5 or 10 years, let alone 80 to 100 years that are relevant to today’s youngest citizens. Not that we should ditch democracy but maybe we should limit entitlements to prevent abuse.
A friend who will randomly lie and mislead you in ways you can’t detect. Might be better to use ai for stuff like writing tests, summarizing data, and other low level stuff one can effectively supervise and where errors are low impact.
I would not treat current llm based ai models as an expert or a trusted friend but as the exact opposite, an unfriendly fake-expert. Unfriendly fake experts are still extremely useful if they work for free and can be scaled up, so definitely op should use ai, but he should never trust it.
Don’t they want a weaker dollar to bring manufacturing back to the US? If manufacturing jobs were up while service sector hiring fell, would that be proof that they are succeeding? Not good for the middle class, perhaps intentionally, but if you’re homeless and need a low skill manufacturing job you’re prospects are finally looking up.