But my central point is that women have a final veto and always have when it comes to these matters and we strengthened it, a lot, with effective contraception. Prior to that the veto still existed but exercising it meant depriving yourself of sexual congress and thus the enjoyment of same; today that is simply no longer true and that Genie is not going back in the bottle.
Here's the basic problem if your timeframe is measured in years or, as is true for anyone in asset markets for retirement, decades: Without at least a stable forward population asset values have no foundation. What is the value of a house if nobody wants to buy it? Go look around portions of middle America that were bypassed by the Interstate highway system -- formerly-stable communities are now literal falling-down wrecks and piles of rubble, both as homes and commercial buildings. Those who cannot think on a forward basis and extrapolate an outcome if things do not change do not see this coming -- but those of us who can, and its a minority of the population, do. Further, who's going to buy the stock that the current 80 year old couple holds when they must sell it in order to fund the care home they need (at $15-20 large per month for both of them) as they slip into terminal dementia? Two million only sounds like a lot of money until a quarter-million is gone in a year's time on that alone!..
...The problem is this: Here we are 15 years after I wrote Leverage and expounded on several of the largest issues in this regard. Exactly zero of those issues have had anything productive done about any of them -- by either political party.
NOT ONE has been addressed and in fact all of them have been made worse.
Young women and men have the ultimate veto on such foolishness and it cannot be overridden. They simply refuse to have children. On the present course when the current generation turns over a bit more than once a stunning 70 million people will disappear from our population simply because they die through age and there is no younger person that is replacing them.
What's your house worth -- and all your stocks -- in that circumstance? No, you cannot import someone from the third world to resolve this because they do not have the skill set and thus earnings capacity to pay up.
Is that a "tomorrow" risk? No, its a couple of decades to four decades out risk but if you wait until it becomes wildly apparent that its upon you the beginning of addressing it takes two more decades during which the destruction of said asset values continues. Indeed if we address it now and thus stop the rot it still takes two decades before we enjoy any of the fruits of that; in the meantime the degenerate spiral continues.
Supply and demand are the fundamental elements of economics; there are no exceptions.
Trump doesn't care and neither do any of the other political heads simply because they'll die before it becomes critical and they have enough money to not care in the interim and the younger cohort (e.g. David Hogg and AOC) appear to be incapable of forward thinking and extrapolation sufficient to understand it or worse, they believe they will be able to become (or are) so wealthy they don't care either.
Mathematics are neither political nor do they change based on your party affiliation. Spain just discovered that insufficient attention to physics usually leads to bad outcomes. The same is true for mathematics and the only way you can get young people to rescind their veto is to convince them that not only have things changed NOW they will REMAIN changed through their children's lives -- not just their own.
