(And, barring those promises not being fulfilled, plenty of people your age and younger have already been working in jobs that qualify them for pensions when they reach a certain age, or have a relative with such a pension with survivorship benefits, and will benefit from them as beneficiaries.)
Pensions are not stealing from the future. When done properly, invested prudently, and managed to a fiduciary standard, they are an effective mechanism to invest those worker capital earned at that time into productive investments to provide returns in the future when those workers approach retirement. Through the 401k attempt, we have shown this policy to be a failure. The human cannot be relied on to financially prepare for retirement, this must be done with systems and at scale.
When I say "stealing from the future," I mean where pensions were promised and now they're being marketed as "too expensive" when what would've gone into pensions over the last 40 years was vacuumed up by the very wealthy through management compensation and shareholder returns. I mean sovereign debt that has been issued, to be paid back by future workers who in no way consented to having to work to pay that debt back. I mean infrastructure and climate expenses that will rapidly approach $1T/year in costs, because we did not have the will to pay for these things today.
Capitalism stole from the future, and it will never be enough. Someone is going to be left holding the bag, and everyone is going to be unhappy the future is not as bright as the past was.
(i am once again asking you to think in systems)
McKinsey: Dependency and depopulation? Confronting the consequences of a new demographic reality - https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-dep... - January 15th, 2025
US Treasury Fiscal Data: What is the national debt? - https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio... ($36.22T as of this comment)
Climate change could erase $1.4 trillion in real estate value - https://www.axios.com/2025/02/03/climate-change-insurance-co... - February 3rd, 2025
Climate crisis costs the world 12% in GDP for every 1°C temperature rise - https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/06/nature-climate-news-... - September 10th, 2024
HN Search: climate change cost - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The cost to fix America’s crumbling infrastructure? Nearly $2.6 trillion, engineers say - https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/30/politics/infrastructure-us-in... - March 30th, 2021
>>42052544 (401k failure citations)
401ks are a terrible on their own. It has thrown everybody for the wolves and tied people's financial wellbeing to the vagaries of the market. But there's still a flipside. Pensions should not be used to provide a level of income to maintain a lifestyle (cue anecdotes of boomers packing up and leaving for florida). Pensions should be to provide a baseline level of financial support for the essentials, perhaps a little above, say like social security but a little more. But they are not that, generally speaking. Retiring at 58 with 80% of wages - or whatever absurdities sometimes occurred - _is_ theft from the young.