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80% of the GDP over the next two decades will be siphoning money out of baby boomers (medical care, retirement homes, luxury cruises) before their children see

80% of the GDP over the next two decades will be siphoning money out of baby boomers (medical care, retirement homes, luxury cruises) before their children see a cent of it. Coupled with AI taking everyone's job, the end result is neo-feudalism where familial dynasties call all the shots.

alephnerd 2mo ago
Not all households are as dysfunctional as the ones you described. And there's a reason why trust and wealth planning has becoming increasingly common. And while I am optimistic about AI's capabilities and am by no means an AI Luddite, assuming AI will take all jobs in the near future is ludicrous.
- cyanydeez 2mo ago
  I think youre confusing "defacto" job loss and "replacement" job loss. Defacto job loss is: Your boss thinks you're replaceable with AI, and he fires you then puts the other workers implicitly responsible for your workload, _regardless of AI's capability. Replacement job loss: AI actually does 100% of your work load. Defacto jobloss is the insideous love child and will definitely accelerate because the "unwoke" mind virus rich people have that people are all replaceable, useless and "takers" as elon calls it. Workers will put up wiht it because they need a job under neofeudalism.
  - alephnerd 2mo ago
    And that isn't how or why layoffs are happening as someone who has made those calls. AI is being used as a scapegoat, but a lot of this is just rightsizing of headcount as I've previously mentioned on HN. Right before GPT-4 we were using COVID as that scapegoat in 2023.
  - hotelsacher 2mo ago
    [dead]
- Scubabear68 2mo ago
  "Not all households are as dysfunctional as the ones you described". This comment of course needs to be taken in the context of HN. In the wider world, we have literal tens of millions of people in the United States who are in poverty and experience daily hunger and deprivation.
  - loeg 2mo ago
    We do not have tens of millions of hungry people unless you're including being a bit peckish before lunch time.
    - jakeydus 2mo ago
      USDA says that 13.7% of US households experienced food insecurity in 2024 [0]. Extrapolate that against population and you get 47 million people. [0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us/key-statistics-graphics https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo... EDIT since I can't reply to irish-coffee for some reason: nobody said literally starving, OP said experiencing hunger or deprivation.
      - irishcoffee 2mo ago
        > Food insecurity is the limited or uncertain access to enough safe, affordable, and nutritious food to live a healthy life. It means people do not know where their next meal will come from or cannot buy enough healthy food because they lack money or other resources Pretty big gap between literal starving and food insecurity.
        mfro 2mo ago
        Pretty big gap in quality of life between people who have no worries about their next meal and those who have to stress over every one.
        aianus 2mo ago
boringg 2mo ago
Bold assessment.
- jimbob45 2mo ago
  It’s not. If you have older parents today, you can do the math on what activities they’re doing and quickly determine that you’re never going to see a cent from them. My friends all report the same. I may sound salty but I’m not. I’ve spent enough time on Reddit to know that the real nightmare is when your parents didn’t save anything and can’t still work. Then, you’re obligated to take care of them and they actively take away from both you and their grandchildren (if they didn’t outright block you from being able to have kids in the first place).
  - CamJN 2mo ago
    > Then, you’re obligated to take care of them No, you very much are not.
    - edot 2mo ago
      Well, in 3/5 of the United States you are. Look up filial laws. They’re rarely enforced but they’re there.
      - CamJN 2mo ago
        Well thankfully I don’t live in that broken country.
    - jimbob45 2mo ago
      Most of us are thankful our parents took care of us and do love them. I recognize that it’s not everyone but I think most kids don’t want to see their parents suffer.
      - CamJN 2mo ago
        > Most I’d love to see a source for that.
hotelsacher 2mo ago
Why is it that every time I see the term "baby boomers" used here, it looks like a slur? Is it just ageism or did they do exceptionally terrible things?
fHr 2mo ago
not wrong
skybrian 2mo ago
That kind of spending is included under "retirement spending" in the article. They estimate that substantial amounts go to heirs after that, but mostly among the affluent.
cyanregiment 2mo ago
I had the same fears but even the boomers sitting on million dollar homes are being called “cash poor”. You still need an income. You can only refinance so much, and then you’re paying off interest. If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax. Some people are paying $1500/mo. in property tax. They need a job just to cover it. You can’t sell the house and cash out because you need that cash to buy the next house without having a huge monthly payment. It’s not enough to just own assets. They have to be capitalized upon in some way - having a renter, building a farm, storage, or other business with it, and so-on. But nobody is really doing that. I think boomers thought they would get rich off the real estate and it’s not really happening. All it did was make prices out of reach for the average person. Super wealthy are buying homes at inflated prices which is interesting and surprising but they’re largely not boomers. Dynasties calling shots maybe, probably. But what’s new?
- cortesoft 2mo ago
  > If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax. That depends on where you live. For example, in California we have Prop 13, which limits how much the assessed value for a home can increase without being sold. This means that even if your house goes up 10x in value, California will only increase the assessed value for tax purposes by 2% each year.
  - smhenderson 2mo ago
    It's similar where I am - a bank and a realtor might say a home is worth .5M but the tax man still assesses it at around 115K. I bought my home over 20 years ago and it is worth much more than I paid on the market. Yet the value of the property for tax purposes is only 3K more than what I paid for it in 2002.
    - deepsun 2mo ago
      Curiously, most homeowners, even recent ones, vote against changing that, because nominal value of the tax would go up for everyone, so we have the status quo. But the solution I think should come out of the budget -- say, a municipal budget gets $100 today from property taxes, while recent homeowners pay $80 of that. If we just change the assessment rules to make it fair with long-time homeowners, then recent homeowners will pay $90, and long-timers will pay, say, $70. But budget only needs $100, not $160. So we can lower taxes at the same time as equalizing the assessment rules.
_doctor_love 2mo ago
> the end result is neo-feudalism where familial dynasties call all the shots I'm going to stick my neck out and say that this is mostly where we are already. Agree that before the boomers can pass money to their children, our corporate overlords will find a way to hoover that money into their vaults. Don't think AI will take everyone's job and is actually orthogonal to this entire issue.
- aianus 2mo ago
  Ok but the corporations are ultimately owned by humans who are alive so there is no way around the generational wealth transfer other than destroying wealth.
inigyou 2mo ago
Isn't that already happening and has happened? This news is a decade late. Last decade we could've said "in the next few years"
SoftTalker 2mo ago
> siphoning money out of baby boomers (medical care, retirement homes, luxury cruises) This has been happening for a while already.
RickJWagner 2mo ago
Siphoning money out of…? Really? What about when you reach retirement age? Will you consider medical care, a new house, or a cruise to be siphoning off of money that presumably belongs to someone else? The money is theirs to use as they see fit. Maybe they earned it, maybe they inherited it. It doesn’t matter. You make your own fortune in this world, and then you get to decide how to spend it.
casey2 2mo ago
What "shots" are the familial dynasties calling if nobody cares to work? I thought AI replaces prompt engineering

alephnerd 2mo ago

Not all households are as dysfunctional as the ones you described. And there's a reason why trust and wealth planning has becoming increasingly common. And while I am optimistic about AI's capabilities and am by no means an AI Luddite, assuming AI will take all jobs in the near future is ludicrous.

cyanydeez 2mo ago
I think youre confusing "defacto" job loss and "replacement" job loss. Defacto job loss is: Your boss thinks you're replaceable with AI, and he fires you then puts the other workers implicitly responsible for your workload, _regardless of AI's capability. Replacement job loss: AI actually does 100% of your work load. Defacto jobloss is the insideous love child and will definitely accelerate because the "unwoke" mind virus rich people have that people are all replaceable, useless and "takers" as elon calls it. Workers will put up wiht it because they need a job under neofeudalism.
- alephnerd 2mo ago
  And that isn't how or why layoffs are happening as someone who has made those calls. AI is being used as a scapegoat, but a lot of this is just rightsizing of headcount as I've previously mentioned on HN. Right before GPT-4 we were using COVID as that scapegoat in 2023.
- hotelsacher 2mo ago
  [dead]
Scubabear68 2mo ago
"Not all households are as dysfunctional as the ones you described". This comment of course needs to be taken in the context of HN. In the wider world, we have literal tens of millions of people in the United States who are in poverty and experience daily hunger and deprivation.
- loeg 2mo ago
  We do not have tens of millions of hungry people unless you're including being a bit peckish before lunch time.
  - jakeydus 2mo ago
    USDA says that 13.7% of US households experienced food insecurity in 2024 [0]. Extrapolate that against population and you get 47 million people. [0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us/key-statistics-graphics https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo... EDIT since I can't reply to irish-coffee for some reason: nobody said literally starving, OP said experiencing hunger or deprivation.
    - irishcoffee 2mo ago
      > Food insecurity is the limited or uncertain access to enough safe, affordable, and nutritious food to live a healthy life. It means people do not know where their next meal will come from or cannot buy enough healthy food because they lack money or other resources Pretty big gap between literal starving and food insecurity.
      - mfro 2mo ago
        Pretty big gap in quality of life between people who have no worries about their next meal and those who have to stress over every one.
        aianus 2mo ago

boringg 2mo ago

Bold assessment.

jimbob45 2mo ago
It’s not. If you have older parents today, you can do the math on what activities they’re doing and quickly determine that you’re never going to see a cent from them. My friends all report the same. I may sound salty but I’m not. I’ve spent enough time on Reddit to know that the real nightmare is when your parents didn’t save anything and can’t still work. Then, you’re obligated to take care of them and they actively take away from both you and their grandchildren (if they didn’t outright block you from being able to have kids in the first place).
- CamJN 2mo ago
  > Then, you’re obligated to take care of them No, you very much are not.
  - edot 2mo ago
    Well, in 3/5 of the United States you are. Look up filial laws. They’re rarely enforced but they’re there.
    - CamJN 2mo ago
      Well thankfully I don’t live in that broken country.
  - jimbob45 2mo ago
    Most of us are thankful our parents took care of us and do love them. I recognize that it’s not everyone but I think most kids don’t want to see their parents suffer.
    - CamJN 2mo ago
      > Most I’d love to see a source for that.

hotelsacher 2mo ago

Why is it that every time I see the term "baby boomers" used here, it looks like a slur? Is it just ageism or did they do exceptionally terrible things?

fHr 2mo ago

not wrong

skybrian 2mo ago

That kind of spending is included under "retirement spending" in the article. They estimate that substantial amounts go to heirs after that, but mostly among the affluent.

cyanregiment 2mo ago

I had the same fears but even the boomers sitting on million dollar homes are being called “cash poor”. You still need an income. You can only refinance so much, and then you’re paying off interest. If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax. Some people are paying $1500/mo. in property tax. They need a job just to cover it. You can’t sell the house and cash out because you need that cash to buy the next house without having a huge monthly payment. It’s not enough to just own assets. They have to be capitalized upon in some way - having a renter, building a farm, storage, or other business with it, and so-on. But nobody is really doing that. I think boomers thought they would get rich off the real estate and it’s not really happening. All it did was make prices out of reach for the average person. Super wealthy are buying homes at inflated prices which is interesting and surprising but they’re largely not boomers. Dynasties calling shots maybe, probably. But what’s new?

cortesoft 2mo ago
> If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax. That depends on where you live. For example, in California we have Prop 13, which limits how much the assessed value for a home can increase without being sold. This means that even if your house goes up 10x in value, California will only increase the assessed value for tax purposes by 2% each year.
- smhenderson 2mo ago
  It's similar where I am - a bank and a realtor might say a home is worth .5M but the tax man still assesses it at around 115K. I bought my home over 20 years ago and it is worth much more than I paid on the market. Yet the value of the property for tax purposes is only 3K more than what I paid for it in 2002.
  - deepsun 2mo ago
    Curiously, most homeowners, even recent ones, vote against changing that, because nominal value of the tax would go up for everyone, so we have the status quo. But the solution I think should come out of the budget -- say, a municipal budget gets $100 today from property taxes, while recent homeowners pay $80 of that. If we just change the assessment rules to make it fair with long-time homeowners, then recent homeowners will pay $90, and long-timers will pay, say, $70. But budget only needs $100, not $160. So we can lower taxes at the same time as equalizing the assessment rules.

_doctor_love 2mo ago

> the end result is neo-feudalism where familial dynasties call all the shots I'm going to stick my neck out and say that this is mostly where we are already. Agree that before the boomers can pass money to their children, our corporate overlords will find a way to hoover that money into their vaults. Don't think AI will take everyone's job and is actually orthogonal to this entire issue.

aianus 2mo ago
Ok but the corporations are ultimately owned by humans who are alive so there is no way around the generational wealth transfer other than destroying wealth.

inigyou 2mo ago

Isn't that already happening and has happened? This news is a decade late. Last decade we could've said "in the next few years"

SoftTalker 2mo ago

> siphoning money out of baby boomers (medical care, retirement homes, luxury cruises) This has been happening for a while already.

RickJWagner 2mo ago

Siphoning money out of…? Really? What about when you reach retirement age? Will you consider medical care, a new house, or a cruise to be siphoning off of money that presumably belongs to someone else? The money is theirs to use as they see fit. Maybe they earned it, maybe they inherited it. It doesn’t matter. You make your own fortune in this world, and then you get to decide how to spend it.

casey2 2mo ago

What "shots" are the familial dynasties calling if nobody cares to work? I thought AI replaces prompt engineering