The disappearing safety net for Baby Boomers
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I think we're good to go. All right, let's do it. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense. Hello, I'm Rima Kareis. Thank you for joining us on the podcast and the YouTube live stream on this Friday, June 13th. Geez, I did not realize that. We're topping off the week with a little economics on tap, which is our weekly happy hour episode.

Yes, and I am here. I know it's a little bit noisy. The audio and video may go in and out, but that is because I am recording to you from the Truman Lounge in the National Press Club here in Washington, D.C., because I'm going out with my girlfriends later and I was trying to be close to where we had to go.

But anyway, here at the National Press Club, it's Friday night. They have a happy hour here, too. It's taco night at the press club. Oh, that's fun. Yes. So we've had our tacos. I've got my National Press Club branded wine that I'm having. And yeah, it's a good time. So we are going to do some news. We are going to play a game. But of course, before we do all of that, we got to do some drinks. So Rima, you know what I've got. What do you have? Yes.

Well, first of all, do you remember when we hung out there? I think like five years ago now when I was in D.C. I do. It's a good memory. Yeah, it's a cool space. It's a really cool space. Okay, so what I'm drinking, I was...

I was trying to be a little bit experimental and try to see if I could make a drink out of things in my garden. So I made a simple syrup of water and sugar, and then I added lemon balm and mint, and it didn't taste quite right. So then I added some raspberries, and I am pleased with it. It's good. That's amazing. I did a lemon balm cocktail last year with lemon balm from my garden. Really? This is my first time.

Yeah, I think it turned out really well. And so lemon balm is a great ingredient. All right. So Rima, what you got for news? All right. What are we talking about today? So I saw an article in The Atlantic titled Baby Boomer's Luck is Running Out. And it got me thinking about some of the things that have been floating in my mind about baby boomer, about the baby boomer generation more generally and how things are going for them and how things might shake out for them, given everything going on in the economy.

And so the article gets at some of these ideas of how a lot of the proposed policy changes and general whiplash in the markets could make things particularly harder for them. And, you know, people like to joke that the baby boomer generation was lucky and had it pretty good. And yeah, like it is a bit reductive, but there is truth in the fact that

College was more affordable for them. They graduated into a strong job market. Many of them were able to buy homes before prices skyrocketed. So this article made the argument that after so much good fortune, they might be in a particularly vulnerable position right now. And it lays out a few reasons. Retirement savings aren't as secure. Longer term care is harder to count on. And for the first time, even Social Security doesn't feel like a sure thing.

So on the markets piece, obviously, after the tariffs were announced in April, there was just a lot of panic when we saw the markets take a dive. They've since bounced back. But it's scary. It's scary watching your savings dip like that when you're nearing retirement. And who knows if it'll happen again, if it'll recover the next time. And then...

In terms of longer-term care, we'll get more into this next week, but under the reconciliation bill as it stands, there would be massive cuts to Medicaid. Right now, more than 7 million low-income seniors rely on Medicaid for health coverage and care. And a big chunk of nursing home residents have their care paid for through Medicaid. So if these cuts go through, states might respond by...

tightening eligibility or reducing benefits. And because the bill would also shift more of that cost to the states, some of them might scale back on the services that are not required to provide under Medicaid, things like home care. And we were talking about this earlier, you flagged it on Slack, which is that a lot of the costs, just generally the article makes this point, which is true, which is that a lot of the costs boomers thought were stable are no longer fixed.

Right. Like even if you look at home costs, if you have a 30 year fixed mortgage, you're still seeing property taxes going up. Homeowners insurance, especially if you live in a place affected by climate change. So from just from that generation's perspective, they may have benefited from a different economic era, but the ground is shifting beneath them right now. And yeah.

Yeah.

are immigrants and immigrant workforces. And I remember almost a decade ago, more than a decade ago, one of my best friends who used to be an LPN, but literally left that workforce because it was just like so hard and so low paid and very little sort of opportunity for growth in that space. And

I guess I can't say this on the radio, but she said for all of the people who are complaining about immigrants, who is going to wipe your grandmother's fill in the blank? And she says, unless you're wrong. Yeah. And she was like, unless you plan on doing it, you might want to be a little bit more open to people coming here from outside of the country who are willing to do care work in particular. And until we get to a situation where paying care workers a more livable wage,

wage until we get to a situation where respecting care workers more if you want to crack down on immigrants and all these other things. And let me pause here to say that the immigrant contribution to the labor force is not the reason that we should be giving immigrants human rights.

People deserve human rights regardless of their economic contribution to this country. People deserve due process regardless of whether or not they're raising our GDP. But...

From that economic perspective, there's also that part of it for when it comes to boomers in particular. Speaking of the reconciliation bill, there was a new CBO analysis that found that that reconciliation bill, and we've been doing a ton of coverage on this on all of our marketplace shows, which I encourage folks to go and listen to. The newest CBO analysis says that that reconciliation bill is going to cost the poorest households in America $1.

$1,600 a year and boost the richest households by $12,000 a year. Say that one more time. So poorest Americans would lose $1,600 a year under this package.

Yeah. And that comes from a combination of cuts to Medicaid, as you mentioned, cuts to SNAP benefits, as you mentioned, a rollback and other services. There's all of these sort of perks in the bill that are supposed to be targeted to low income Americans. And a lot of low income Americans won't see any benefit from it because they already don't owe federal taxes. And because these tax credits are not refundable, they actually don't get much benefit from it. And so, yeah, that's startling. Is it, though?

Is it? Is it? I mean, it's just like, like, but when you put those numbers next to each other, right? It's like $1,600 for someone who's low income. That's groceries. That's medicine. That's rent. That's essential money. It's not discretionary. Whereas $12,000 for someone who's wealthy, that goes into savings. That's investing. That's for a future generation, right? It's, it's a vacation. It's a vacation. Yeah.

Anyway, I'm going to use this moment to pause and say that once again, we are going to spend most of next week talking about the reconciliation package. It's a big piece of legislation. So if any of you all have questions about it, please send those in to us. We're already going through the questions you've sent in. Thank you to everybody who's written in already. But if you have a question about any component of it, whether what it means for seniors, what it means for immigrants,

because there's a lot of stuff in there about the immigrant population, changing the way that some tax policies apply to people depending on your immigration status. Anything else, clean energy credits, let us know. You know the numbers to get at us. So thank you for that news. Let us take a bit of a break, and then when we come back, we are going to play a game. Let's do it. ♪

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Offer valid on select 2024 and 2025 Rams for non-FCA employees and retirees. $200 admin fee applies. Not all buyers will qualify. Restrictions apply. Does not apply to leases. See dealer for details and 63025. Ram is a registered trademark of FCA US LLC. All right, it is game time. Drew Jostad is here to host a round of Half Full, Half Empty. Hello, Drew. First up. Hey, Rima. All right. First up this week. Are you familiar with Labubu toys? No. No?

This has been weirdly coming across my timeline. It's some like weird, not weird. Let me not yuck somebody else's yum. This is some, it's a toy. And as I understand it, it's, I think it's like rabbit like that has been, uh,

Very popular in a Beanie Baby type style. And then somebody sold something at an auction for a lot of money. Help me out here, Drew. It's sort of a creepy looking rabbit with a toothy grin on its face. It comes from a 2015 picture book series, but it's been licensed to a Chinese toy company called Pop Mart.

If you're lucky enough to grab one before they go out of stock, you can get a keychain Labubu for about $28. A doll's going to run you over $100. And then the bigger and more special they get, they can get up into the thousands. The auction Kimberly's referring to, I think, was over $100,000.

No. Pretty popular to buy these on TikTok live streams. They come in blind boxes, so you don't know specifically which one you're going to get. But are you half full or half empty? I'm going to say half empty. I'm not trying to spend $28 on a keychain or $100 on a doll. You look like you're deliberating.

I'm going to go half full because I am half full on people spending their discretionary income on what they want to spend it on and supporting the arts in whatever kind of manifestation it's going to be. That's real. All right. We're going to stay toy adjacent here. Are you half full or half empty on the booming sales of the Nintendo Switch 2?

Sold three and a half million units in four days. The fastest selling Nintendo console ever. Are you a gamer?

I am not a gamer, although I have mad respect for gamers. And I feel like, and David Brancaccio on our morning show is great about this. I feel like as economic journalists, we need to be paying more attention to the gaming industry because it's bigger than the movie industry, bigger than the TV industry. And people spend a lot of their time and money on games. I am half full on the Nintendo Switch sales because I feel like this is the reason that a decent chunk of America knows about tariffs.

That's a good one. But what's the difference? Does anyone know? I'm looking at the chat. I do have a Nintendo Switch and I play it, but I'm not enough of a gamer to know if I should upgrade or not. I'm sure it's like a stronger graphics and better processing speed and maybe storage space. I don't know all those things. Yeah, you can play fancier games. Yeah, I mean, I'll do half full. As Jefferson said, it's for the kids. Yeah.

In the chat. And the adults who are kids at heart. What's the next one, Drew? Next one comes from a feature in the New York Times where the reporter attended the ninth annual Fine Waters Taste Awards and profiles water sommeliers and talks about all of the premium brands of natural water. Are you half full or half empty on fine water? I do love a good blind taste test, which it feels like it's in that realm of things.

No, but I'm more in half empty land. It does feel like a kind of elitist borderline, maybe. Yeah, I'm going to go half empty. I don't like anything that sort of places additional barriers or like parameters on water.

Although, as I'm thinking about it, given the rollback of certain federal agencies that are responsible for maintaining the cleanliness of our water, we might be relying on folks with a particular palate for sensing various things in our water supply. More so than in the past. So, you know, I'm switching it half-fold. You know, get those taste buds lined up so we can rely on you in the future. What's next, Drew?

Next up is the poll. All right, folks. In the YouTube chat. Give us your opinions. Okay. This last one is a bit tricky. It's not as lighthearted as the rest. Are you half full or half empty on free speech rights for AI chatbots? Oh. Oh.

Wasn't there a case about this, Drew? Yeah. Can you say more? So the story comes from a Marketplace Tech episode this week regarding a wrongful death lawsuit filed against Character AI and Google. And part of the claim made by the companies was that they had First Amendment rights that needed to be taken into consideration. The judge has rejected that claim for now. So that's the status of the case.

If I recall this story correctly, someone who later died by suicide was chatting with an AI chatbot, correct? Yeah. That's correct. It's a wrongful death lawsuit. And so they're trying to assess whether or not that AI chatbot and the companies that create them have liability if they're feeding someone information that feeds into what's already a negative spiral.

It's a really serious situation, especially as so many more people are relying on AI chatbots for emotional support, for, you know, company, especially if they're feeling lonely and, you know,

Sometimes even like low-level therapy or sometimes high-level therapy, unfortunately, when they're not designed for that. I was at a seminar last weekend and they were talking about the differences between the different types of AI. And a lot of these tools like ChatGPT are just designed to predict what word comes next based on what the Internet says what should come next.

You know, it's not thinking about what your question is or what the answer is or what is the truth. It's just based on the Internet, what word comes next, what series of words comes next. And that is not a way to get mental health care. So I am going to go ahead and say that I'm all. What was the question again? Let me make sure I'm phrasing it right.

Free speech rights for AI chatbots. Yeah, absolutely not. No, no, no, no, no. No, it's like, yeah, no question. All the way half empty. I mean, there's just too many real world risks, defamation, misinformation, dangerous advice, manipulation. It's too messy. We can't even entertain that. That's how I feel. All right. We've got the poll results. And I think that the vast majority of people agree with us. Half empty, 95%. Half full, just 4%.

Yeah. All right. All right. That is all for today. Don't forget, if you want to send us questions about the reconciliation bill, you can email us at makemesmartatmarketplace.org or leave us a voicemail at 508-UBSMART. Please let us know. Hit us up. We've got to dance for this part, Rima. Oh, yeah. I keep forgetting that I'm on video. Oh, my gosh. Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergseeker. Today's episode was engineered by Jake Cherry. Oh, no. Where did my credits go?

Sorry, y'all. The team behind our Friday game is Emily McCune, Jamila Huxtable, and Antoinette Brock. Daisy Palacios is our supervising senior producer. Nancy Fargali is executive producer of Marketplace Shows. And Joanne Griffith is our chief content officer. And things are getting popping here at the National Press Club. About to have my Friday night get going. Nice.

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