Author Topic: Retiring Boomers Making Inflation, Labor Shortage Worse  (Read 3479 times)

rcjordan

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Retiring Boomers Making Inflation, Labor Shortage Worse
« on: December 02, 2022, 05:20:39 PM »
TLDR;
"An aging population will hurt the US economy's ability to grow without creating inflation longer term," the BlackRock study said, adding that the number of people retiring makes "it hard for the economy to operate at current activity levels without fueling inflation."

That means the Fed has to bring inflation down by reducing demand via the higher interest rates, signaling a harsher economic downturn than the US could have had.

https://www.businessinsider.com/boomers-retirement-inflation-recession-labor-shortage-fed-millennials-gen-z-2022-11

aaron

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Re: Retiring Boomers Making Inflation, Labor Shortage Worse
« Reply #1 on: January 14, 2023, 01:42:41 PM »
Big issue is a disproportionate share of senior spending is on healthcare services & absolutely no politicians are doing anything to reign in the grift there.

ergophobe

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Re: Retiring Boomers Making Inflation, Labor Shortage Worse
« Reply #2 on: January 16, 2023, 04:53:35 PM »
As a Boomer (just barely), I am glad to see that we have stopped blaming Millennials for everything bad and are back to blaming Boomers who, I think, are actually responsible for most of The Bad.

I am also very tired of hearing Boomers complain about how Millennials don't want to work, when the entire explanation for low labor force participation is the decrease in participation among the 55+ crowd (so oldest Gen X and younger Boomers).

>> grift

Is it grift? The fundamental "problem" is that the healthcare system has mostly offloaded the costs for the most expensive patients to the government and given the least expensive patients to the private sector. My brother needed some medical services shortly after turning 65 and was shocked to see how cheap it was compared to what he paid a year earlier. I'm sure there is a ton of grift throughout the healthcare sector, but with respect to seniors, I think there's a bad set of incentives, rules and customs and the simple fact that the over-65s are just going to be an expensive population no matter how efficient the system is.
« Last Edit: January 16, 2023, 04:55:13 PM by ergophobe »

rcjordan

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ergophobe

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Re: Retiring Boomers Making Inflation, Labor Shortage Worse
« Reply #4 on: January 16, 2023, 07:57:42 PM »
 :D. I’ll be sharing that

Still, I’m grateful for the time I got in the f### Around Century. The alternative is either to be born in the Find  Out Century or to live through the Great Depression and a World War or to live a short life.

Of course, the Find Out Century might have those things too. I’m just hoping they happen after 2054 since the actuarial charts say I have an 90% chance of being dead by then
« Last Edit: January 16, 2023, 08:02:10 PM by ergophobe »

aaron

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Re: Retiring Boomers Making Inflation, Labor Shortage Worse
« Reply #5 on: January 19, 2023, 02:36:34 PM »
Is it grift?

Absolutely it is a grift.

Look at healthcare spending relative to GDP across time for the US and then look at it versus any other country and it is obvious there is more than just a bit of mixed shifting around of costs.

Even the least expensive patients in the private sector get to enjoy things like differential pricing based on insurance status, gotcha dropped coverage for pre-existing conditions (illegal, but they do it anyhow), illegal to import medicines from Canada (out of alleged safety concerns) even though the company which manufactures the pills offshored the production to China or India, double billing, billing for services not rendered, hidden prices until after the fact.

There are also CON laws where you have to get your direct competitors to sign a paper stating your services are needed before you can open a new service provider, then on the flip side there are hospital groups doing regional roll ups, the whole "out of service" insurance exemptions & so on.

Of course older people break down and consume way more healthcare products & services than younger people do, but like just the fraud in the healthcare system is a tithing over the entire economy.

Think of how much hype something like ChatGPT is getting & how much online databases and technology have lowered the cost of organizing data sets over time. Obamacare was being touted as a "jobs" program
https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2016/07/what-is-the-effect-of-obamacare-economy-000164/
where people were getting McJobs shuffling paperwork back and forth between insurers and care providers.

When Republicans pushed to repeal the ACA the New York Times warned it could detrail that McJobs job engine
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/06/business/health-act-repeal-would-strike-economys-engine.html

And all we really need to do is look at the stock price of United Healthcare (UNH) since Obamacare passed and ask if we should expect government regulated financial intermediaries to grow market cap at a faster rate than the global FANG monopolies have. Their share price was ~ $21 a share when Obama took office & is now ~ $480, for a 23x growth in 14 years. They aren't a small company either, with a market cap of $448 billion - about 25% larger than Meta.

My disgust for the above gift stems in part from having my wife dropped from insurance coverage twice. Once before Obamacare and once during it. If we didn't move after she was illegally dropped by the insurer we would have been fined for being uninsured.
« Last Edit: January 19, 2023, 02:38:05 PM by aaron »

buckworks

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Re: Retiring Boomers Making Inflation, Labor Shortage Worse
« Reply #6 on: January 19, 2023, 03:18:57 PM »
>> healthcare spending relative to GDP

Last time I checked, in Canada the percentage is at least one-third less than the US. And Canada's average lifespan is at least two years longer than the US.

It's not perfect, but when I count my blessings Canada's Medicare system is high on the list.

ergophobe

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Re: Retiring Boomers Making Inflation, Labor Shortage Worse
« Reply #7 on: January 19, 2023, 07:45:55 PM »
Absolutely it is a grift.

Oh, I agree with all that. I was operating on a narrower and somewhat different definition of grift. I certainly agree that the labyrinthine, Kafkaesque nature of the American healthcare system is intentional.

>>a "jobs" program

This is the rationale for the California high-speed rail system. Nobody even tries to pretend it will have a lot of riders, pay back the investment in either money or carbon. Their 2022 year-end report was only about how many jobs they had created.

And that's how this ties into the original thread. We have a medical system and a transit system that function as jobs programs right at a time when the size of the labor force and labor force participation are falling as Boomers retire and retire early.

ergophobe

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Re: Retiring Boomers Making Inflation, Labor Shortage Worse
« Reply #8 on: March 03, 2023, 03:21:08 PM »

rcjordan

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Re: Retiring Boomers Making Inflation, Labor Shortage Worse
« Reply #9 on: March 06, 2023, 10:50:18 PM »
BofA: Boomers partly to blame for latest inflation burst

https://www.axios.com/2023/03/06/boomers-spending-inflation