How many Gen X are counting on Social Security?
- Thread starter LRRPF52
- Start date
doesnt really matter what one thinks because the day SS becomes unavailable is the day the SHTF in this country.
You’re fine as I don’t do any ad hominem, just like sticking to merits. We might buy a lot of cheap foreign consumer goods, but those aren’t even close to the big ticket and monthly expenditures of American households.
For the median US household, these are typically the largest expenditures:
You’ll see that almost everything on that breakdown is US goods and services, with a small % of cheap foreign products in the personal & discretionary spending and clothing categories. I work hard to spend as much of that on US-made weapons, ammo, gear, and accessories so there isn’t any left for cheap trash from overseas, but it really doesn’t affect the US economy that much.
There are many US States individually that dwarf most nations in industrial capacity. US is the 3rd largest population in the world with the largest economy, best infrastructure, most connected rail/river/road networks, and in a temperate zone. We also have more sea ports that allow heavy displacement vessels to dock across 3 huge coastlines, with an inter-coastal waterway that exists nowhere else on earth.
You would have to put together multiple maps like this to show each industry, and in almost every category, we beat most nations for value-added products, agriculture, technology, advanced materials, high-end semiconductors, automobiles, trucks, farm equipment, etc. The nations that have one or two categories over us are using US equipment to do so, which is what you’re referring to when we offshored a lot of heavy industry to Asia in the 1970s-forward, but they still don’t compete well even in limited spreads of industrial output. Hard to compete with a population of 328 million people who have more farmland, rivers, sea ports, and no enemies around them to create instability.
Literally every other nation is vulnerable or currently dealing with regional instability, with shockwaves being felt in the power structures in government and competition from rivals, with unstable political-economic conditions. The US infrastructure is really difficult to grasp even in a full lifetime of studying it, it’s that large.
This goes back to the point about our worthless politicians, who can’t even manage or be trusted to run a basic retirement plan that should never have been government-mandated in the first place.
Boomers done fucked this country up 7 ways to Sunday but "as long as I get mine".
Guess what, what you paid in is gone. It was not an investment account, you paid for your elders. It's a tax nothing more nothing less and if you need social security to have a stable retirement you planned poorly and deserve to be destitute.
If I could get rid of SS, Medicare and Medicaid today, I would. And they pay my paycheck. They are all fucking rackets of corruption from top to bottom. We would be way better off as a nation letting the poor die off and saving the tax dollars for the productive to reinvest.
People who aren't maxing their 401ks/IRAs are going to be in a world of fucking hurt.
Now what's interesting is 2 things:
1. Lots of younger people dying earlier post covid. Either weird cancers, heart issues or other shit. If you look at mortality rates of 35-50, it's something crazy like 4x what it was 10 years ago.
2. Infertility has gone through the roof as well post covid. People are not able to have kids and there is no real explanation other than the bio weapon Virus/ bio weapon Vax.
These two are going to present some interesting challenges going forward.
Guess what, what you paid in is gone. It was not an investment account, you paid for your elders. It's a tax nothing more nothing less and if you need social security to have a stable retirement you planned poorly and deserve to be destitute.
If I could get rid of SS, Medicare and Medicaid today, I would. And they pay my paycheck. They are all fucking rackets of corruption from top to bottom. We would be way better off as a nation letting the poor die off and saving the tax dollars for the productive to reinvest.
People who aren't maxing their 401ks/IRAs are going to be in a world of fucking hurt.
Now what's interesting is 2 things:
1. Lots of younger people dying earlier post covid. Either weird cancers, heart issues or other shit. If you look at mortality rates of 35-50, it's something crazy like 4x what it was 10 years ago.
2. Infertility has gone through the roof as well post covid. People are not able to have kids and there is no real explanation other than the bio weapon Virus/ bio weapon Vax.
These two are going to present some interesting challenges going forward.
i’m no boomer (genx) but how did they do that?
to me, the politicians, bankers and big corporations are what fucked us over.
First, worry about here and now. If, at retirement age, there is no Social Security left you'll have a lot more to worry about than that. Quit being persecuted and start producing. Your future belongs to you not me. I suspect that MOST of you Millennials and Gen X'ers haven't contributed enough to even be in the conversation. You're no worse off than I was in the 70's and 80's or my parents were in the 30's and 40's.
Yes , my money. My money is funding baby boomers social security. They literally take it from me, and give it to baby boomers, among others
Yeah that's the typical boomer hog wash man. First off, I've contributed a VERY large amount for 30 years. Second, it's absolutely a fact that it's a ton worse financially today than 70' and 80's. This isn't even a question. This crap right here is why boomers are viewed the way they are. I'm fine, I started my business from nothing and have planned well and saved and worked my butt off to get where I am. It's not about me, yet the fact remains that the boomers are the last generation who's parents gave them a better country than they had. The boomers DID NOT DO THIS for future generations, and they were the first in America not to do so.
Older genx'er here and IMO, SS isn't going anywhere. Blessfully, I will be fine either way, but I'm just sayin' it is like abortion, a scare tactic, divisive and a means to keep people at odds with each other. This helps establish the pillars of power on both sides, while politicians enrich their donors with favorable policy, and enrich themselves in the process...
I tend to agree with the above. That said I don't include it in my planning, but will also take it day one if it's around when I'm eligible.
Not picking on you personally at all, but this shows how little our people understand Social Security. You have been lied to that there is a Social Security "Trust Fund". That is a Democrat lie and talking point every election to allow them to tax and spend more. Some years the MSM gives it more play than others. There is not a "Fund" of any sort. No investments. Just IOU's It is a Ponzi Scheme where they take our money today and hand it to retirees while shaving off some or maybe most of the income for their cronies pet projects to get their kickbacks off of. Understand this and be very angry. I am 50 and believe I have little hope of ever seeing a dime of my SS taxes back. Here is an article from 22 years ago. Still true.
No. 619: The Truth — There Is No Social Security Trust Fund
Erskine Bowles uses demagoguery and misrepresentation in raising Social Security as a campaign issue.
www.carolinajournal.com
thats well said.
as for gen x’ers being prosperous, we are. i know plenty of guys that have started businesses and been successful and are still going, myself included.
as for boomers….well they created millennials and we know how that worked out
I have to say -- I respect the hell out of your knowledge on the Grendel cartridge, but I do not see things the way you do -- statistically, on this topic of manufacture status circa 2024. I don't care about statistics when the things I've seen over my work career demonstrate the falsity of the stats. I did ugrad in Bio where I was taught to be wary of stats mis-used, and in litigation I have seen them badly misused. So I don't agree with your conclusions about leading the planet on industry. In fact I disagree quite strongly.There are many US States individually that dwarf most nations in industrial capacity. US is the 3rd largest population in the world with the largest economy, best infrastructure, most connected rail/river/road networks, and in a temperate zone. We also have more sea ports that allow heavy displacement vessels to dock across 3 huge coastlines, with an inter-coastal waterway that exists nowhere else on earth.
You would have to put together multiple maps like this to show each industry, and in almost every category, we beat most nations for value-added products, agriculture, technology, advanced materials, high-end semiconductors, automobiles, trucks, farm equipment, etc. The nations that have one or two categories over us are using US equipment to do so, which is what you’re referring to when we offshored a lot of heavy industry to Asia in the 1970s-forward, but they still don’t compete well even in limited spreads of industrial output. Hard to compete with a population of 328 million people who have more farmland, rivers, sea ports, and no enemies around them to create instability.
Literally every other nation is vulnerable or currently dealing with regional instability, with shockwaves being felt in the power structures in government and competition from rivals, with unstable political-economic conditions. The US infrastructure is really difficult to grasp even in a full lifetime of studying it, it’s that large.
This goes back to the point about our worthless politicians, who can’t even manage or be trusted to run a basic retirement plan that should never have been government-mandated in the first place.
You have to ignore all the de-industrialization 1975-2024 to even begin thinking it's true.
Now, if we were to talk about resident capability, talent available to perform global-leadership level industrial prowess -- yes, we certainly have that. But the hardware/tools have been either sold off, junked, or neglected. The workers' own practical skills, left to rot. The promise of a job/career in industry, almost non-existent.
I went to college in the Ohio River valley where steel and coal was being shut down, during my tenure as student. Most students came from the region and were 1st in family to go to college because the mill/mine jobs were drying up. Forty years ago.
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Also, LRRPF52 -- as a one-man's history bit of trivia. In 2003 I decided I would learn how to assemble CrMo tubes into a bike frame. Went to learn tube joining/frame design, bought tubes. Began pondering how to cut/mitre them. Horizontal and vertical mills could be had for a song, if manual mills, in that era. Cost was pennies -- shipping was expensive. I bought a Hardinge mill for $350 and paid more than double that to have it put on pallets and shipped to me. Five years later I sold the mill to a guy in my town for what I paid for it.
If our industry were busy, and people with skills were in full employment using them, you could not find mills for a song. Their dis-use is the reason for their pennies-on-the-dollar pricing.
Other personal history -- in HS I took many classes in Mechanical Drawing, hoping to get a draftsman's job or maybe go into ME later. I was in HS 1975-1978, in greater DC metro area. Prior to my going to HS, there were many drafting shops around the region, supporting industrial work mostly for DoD affiliated projects.
By 1978 HS graduation, the jobs already were quite thinned. That's how fast after the Vietnam War's closure (formal fedgov activity) the de-industrialization began.
Fall of '78 I entered Univ MD in ENGR. I aimed at Mech Engr. I like mechanical things, machines of all sorts. The overall attitude of ENGR faculty, toward us students, was "electronics are the future, mechanics is dinosaur material." They pushed us hard toward computers, and even harder away from machines proper. Univ MD at the time was known for its Mech Engr and Aeronautics, thanks to Glenn L Martin (Martin/Marietta) throwing a lot of money at the school and facilitating a wind tunnel there.
I left the DC region permanently 30+ years ago. In my youth, Navy had a lot of activity at the David Taylor Ship Basin in Carderock. That's part of what fueled the draftsman shops, a small part but a part nonetheless. How busy are they in Carderock these days, versus 50 years ago?
I grew up next to Naval Ordnance Lab in Hillandale MD. Watched it change to NSWC and begin drying up. Was friends with a kid whose dad was a CMDR there. The dad talked about the history of the place, how busy it was in WW2 and Korean War and Vietnam War versus the 1970s post-Vietnam (which was when I met the kid whose dad was CMDR there).
How many DoD facilities are within 200 miles of DC? Places where materiel or craft are tested, and thus mechanical parts would be needed for design/testing, thus requiring machining shops and drafting shops for support? Why did they all dry up, but the DoD facilities mostly remain? What is being produced?
If our industry were busy, and people with skills were in full employment using them, you could not find mills for a song. Their dis-use is the reason for their pennies-on-the-dollar pricing.
Other personal history -- in HS I took many classes in Mechanical Drawing, hoping to get a draftsman's job or maybe go into ME later. I was in HS 1975-1978, in greater DC metro area. Prior to my going to HS, there were many drafting shops around the region, supporting industrial work mostly for DoD affiliated projects.
By 1978 HS graduation, the jobs already were quite thinned. That's how fast after the Vietnam War's closure (formal fedgov activity) the de-industrialization began.
Fall of '78 I entered Univ MD in ENGR. I aimed at Mech Engr. I like mechanical things, machines of all sorts. The overall attitude of ENGR faculty, toward us students, was "electronics are the future, mechanics is dinosaur material." They pushed us hard toward computers, and even harder away from machines proper. Univ MD at the time was known for its Mech Engr and Aeronautics, thanks to Glenn L Martin (Martin/Marietta) throwing a lot of money at the school and facilitating a wind tunnel there.
I left the DC region permanently 30+ years ago. In my youth, Navy had a lot of activity at the David Taylor Ship Basin in Carderock. That's part of what fueled the draftsman shops, a small part but a part nonetheless. How busy are they in Carderock these days, versus 50 years ago?
I grew up next to Naval Ordnance Lab in Hillandale MD. Watched it change to NSWC and begin drying up. Was friends with a kid whose dad was a CMDR there. The dad talked about the history of the place, how busy it was in WW2 and Korean War and Vietnam War versus the 1970s post-Vietnam (which was when I met the kid whose dad was CMDR there).
How many DoD facilities are within 200 miles of DC? Places where materiel or craft are tested, and thus mechanical parts would be needed for design/testing, thus requiring machining shops and drafting shops for support? Why did they all dry up, but the DoD facilities mostly remain? What is being produced?
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Been contributing into SS, Medicare, Medicaid since the 1980s. Gen X. This isn’t a blame game, just wanting to see who is realistically counting on their SS from Gen X when we start retiring. Not sure if you’ve noticed, but housing, auto, insurance, groceries, utilities, and everything else has inflated dramatically to the point that the SS pay-outs will not have any real buying power for much when Gen X starts retiring.
Makes many of us consider that maybe the Baby Boomers should be the last to collect, and Gen X and later get some type of refund into IRAs that the organized crime family stooges in Congress can’t touch. I know, good luck with that. But they don’t have an argument that really favors the remaining generations to support SS anymore.
You know what is interesting, the same gov that FORCED everyone to pay into S/S is still the same gov sowing division, and spending S/S money on many other projects. Plus its the same gov that pays the gamers, to game the system. Where is the outrage against that, none,... because most of you can't see past the end of your fucking noses. All you know is finger pointing, why because, you're not smart enough to think for your selves just they way the gov has trained you from birth. Yet we wonder why there is such division across the spectrum,...
The data and reality on this are that the US is the 2nd largest manufacturer in the world though, focusing on high value-added products, while China at #1 cranks out cheap garbage products in lower value-added sectors. This isn’t a manipulation of any statistics, just the hard reality.
The US accounts for 16.6% of global manufacturing, and its output is valued at $1.8 trillion. The U.S.’s production includes automobiles, chemical products, food products, military equipment, and aircraft.
One of the many critical things we provide is refined petroleum products because we have the most oil refinement capacity and are without peer. We are also without peer when it comes to auto, aviation/aerospace, and weapons.
For example, in the military aerospace sector, we are the only Nation with 4 active fighter production lines open, the only Nation with a bomber production line open, and have a significant number of missile, munitions, vehicles of all types, artillery, mobile launchers, Radios/Data-links, etc. with active production lines open. The quantity and quality of these systems are without peer.
What happened in the period you describe was offloading less-efficient manufacturing tooling and methods to our Asian trade partners, while we upgraded to CNC, more automation, more emphasis on semiconductors, programmers, and systems engineering.
The Asian partners cranked out the mid-tier commercial subsystems and components while American tech workers engineered the high density SC chips in Silicon Valley, firmware and software programmers wrote the code for the computing systems for CNC and automated assembly lines, and military and commercial computing systems for both government and private applications using these systems.
That’s why WWII end mills could be purchased for a song, but shipping costs continued to inflate. If we weren’t making anything and the industrial shift wasn’t happening with major value-added, the shipping costs would also be dirt-cheap.
To test this, see what the costs are on CNC machines vs WWII-era end mills, lathes, and other manually-operated tooling.
The data and reality on this are that the US is the 2nd largest manufacturer in the world though, focusing on high value-added products, while China at #1 cranks out cheap garbage products in lower value-added sectors. This isn’t a manipulation of any statistics, just the hard reality.
The US accounts for 16.6% of global manufacturing, and its output is valued at $1.8 trillion. The U.S.’s production includes automobiles, chemical products, food products, military equipment, and aircraft.
the only Nation with a bomber production line open,
We build bombers because we go around bombing weak broke countries with nothing to resist with.
I don't think anybody seriously expects bombers to survive much if a major war breaks out with a near peer or otherwise well equipped country.
Missiles, drones and hypersonic vehicles are the more worthwhile thing to throw money at, unless you have just huge amounts of borrowed money to waste keeping a MIC happy.
Hence why most don't care about them anymore.
For production method advancement, we went from hand-assembled stamped parts like this:
To precision-machined and Laser overlaid fastener location when applying carbon nanotube composite RAS skin like this:
We simply live in a totally different world when it comes to advanced manufacturing processes, automation, leveraging of input to output, materials sciences, and computing power plays a central role in all of it. This is why there was a lot of emphasis in Computer sciences while the old inefficient WWII machinery was sold off decades ago.
Even the 1950s and 1960s tooling in Aerospace moved rapidly away from WWII-era machines, especially when you look at the increases use of Titanium and the move into monocoque construction of fuselages, with high-temp engine cowlings necessary to insulate the airframe from radiant hear off the afterburners.
Then in the 1960s, we started doing Electron Beam-welding with one of the more well-known structures being the F-14’s Titanium wing box.
In the 1970s, we started using more boron-epoxy laminates for military aircraft, in addition to aluminum and titanium.
The most aggressive market sector for advancements in materials science and manufacturing methods has always been military aerospace. It really drives progress in electronics, materials, processing power/compactness, optics, RF sensors, man-machine interface, systems integration, production management, and supply-side restructuring.
There are technologies we developed in the 1950s that still haven’t been matched by any of the other industrial nations.
To precision-machined and Laser overlaid fastener location when applying carbon nanotube composite RAS skin like this:
We simply live in a totally different world when it comes to advanced manufacturing processes, automation, leveraging of input to output, materials sciences, and computing power plays a central role in all of it. This is why there was a lot of emphasis in Computer sciences while the old inefficient WWII machinery was sold off decades ago.
Even the 1950s and 1960s tooling in Aerospace moved rapidly away from WWII-era machines, especially when you look at the increases use of Titanium and the move into monocoque construction of fuselages, with high-temp engine cowlings necessary to insulate the airframe from radiant hear off the afterburners.
Then in the 1960s, we started doing Electron Beam-welding with one of the more well-known structures being the F-14’s Titanium wing box.
In the 1970s, we started using more boron-epoxy laminates for military aircraft, in addition to aluminum and titanium.
The most aggressive market sector for advancements in materials science and manufacturing methods has always been military aerospace. It really drives progress in electronics, materials, processing power/compactness, optics, RF sensors, man-machine interface, systems integration, production management, and supply-side restructuring.
There are technologies we developed in the 1950s that still haven’t been matched by any of the other industrial nations.
A 22lr behind the correct ears, and that shit would not be needed.For production method advancement, we went from hand-assembled stamped parts like this:
To precision-machined and Laser overlaid fastener location when applying carbon nanotube composite RAS skin like this:
We simply live in a totally different world when it comes to advanced manufacturing processes, automation, leveraging of input to output, materials sciences, and computing power plays a central role in all of it. This is why there was a lot of emphasis in Computer sciences while the old inefficient WWII machinery was sold off decades ago.
Even the 1950s and 1960s tooling in Aerospace moved rapidly away from WWII-era machines, especially when you look at the increases use of Titanium and the move into monocoque construction of fuselages, with high-temp engine cowlings necessary to insulate the airframe from radiant hear off the afterburners.
Then in the 1960s, we started doing Electron Beam-welding with one of the more well-known structures being the F-14’s Titanium wing box.
In the 1970s, we started using more boron-epoxy laminates for military aircraft, in addition to aluminum and titanium.
The most aggressive market sector for advancements in materials science and manufacturing methods has always been military aerospace. It really drives progress in electronics, materials, processing power/compactness, optics, RF sensors, man-machine interface, systems integration, production management, and supply-side restructuring.
There are technologies we developed in the 1950s that still haven’t been matched by any of the other industrial nations.
We all know this. To act like we somehow are missing it and thus only focused on boomers is just deflection. I VERY MUCH DOUBT that anyone here will argue about me stating the absolute insanity that is our gubment programs spending on ILLEGALS AND THEIR ANCHOR BABIES. We all know that it's insane what our govt does and in particular the spending on illegals who shouldn't be here, which entices more to come, and they damn sure haven't paid into squat! We know that, just like we know the abuse of our other do gooder programs. That doesn't change other things, and no one is coming down on the boomers anyway. Denying the reality of the situation just doesn't help anyone do anything.
Dems want millions of illegals for their new victim class to exploit while also being able to say they have the numbers in key counties for their normal election-rigging apparatus. They count all their votes for the Dem candidate even as most of them don’t vote.
Businesses need the cheap labor because the natural-born Americans were murdered in the womb with industrial-scale abortion treated as a normal women’s healthcare procedure.
Congress also loves and welcomes the tens of millions of illegals who pay into SS using fake IDs to get employment, now that E-Verify has been in place for a long time. Illegal immigrant attorneys steer illegals to document mills where they buy DL, SS, and BC as package deals, knowing this is required to get a job. Many of them are remittance payment generators anyway, with substantial estates back in the home country to retire into.
One of the reasons I’m a big fan of taxing remittance payments at 150%. Shut that crap down really fast.
Businesses need the cheap labor because the natural-born Americans were murdered in the womb with industrial-scale abortion treated as a normal women’s healthcare procedure.
Congress also loves and welcomes the tens of millions of illegals who pay into SS using fake IDs to get employment, now that E-Verify has been in place for a long time. Illegal immigrant attorneys steer illegals to document mills where they buy DL, SS, and BC as package deals, knowing this is required to get a job. Many of them are remittance payment generators anyway, with substantial estates back in the home country to retire into.
One of the reasons I’m a big fan of taxing remittance payments at 150%. Shut that crap down really fast.
You guys are pretty sad. I see men and women in our store on a daily basis that are young, competitive, wealthy and productive and the main take from all of them is they’re too busy working, earning and taking care of their own lives to sit around and blame everyone else for every little problem in their lives. Those are the people who will lead the rest of you into your “golden years”. These days are not nearly as bad for them as so many of you others seem to find it.
I must be reading people’s responses differently, because so far, the consensus is that nobody is counting on it from Gen X’ers and we are obviously doing other things to plan for retirement.
I don’t think any financially-literate person from Gen X would say, “I think Social Security will be solvent when I retire."
Yes, that's exactly what has been said, you are absolutely correct.
LRRPF52, you are offering "data" that are misleading and/or massaged.
What does that mean, exactly, "2d best" in "value-added" manufacture?
What does it mean compared to 50 years ago, best in all manufacture (generic, w/ exceptions)?
Instead of making excuses, why not seek and explain the problems? Recasting a dwindling system in empathetic terms doesn't help fix 50 years of de-industrialization. It doesn't fix 50 years of right-minded but badly implemented enviro laws/regs. It doesn't fix weird trends in US Atty Genl prosecutions of select businesses, while ignoring others in parallel situations. Et cetera.
No problem ever gets fixed by dressing up the problematic situation. "Warts and all" is a required POV for repair. Always.
On the main Q of who is expecting sustenance from SocSec, I would say young folks would be wise to see it as is, rather than how ideally SocSec is desired to work. And it has looked precarious since the 1980s, so that suggests fragility presently.
The economy on a national scale is fragile; relative to the global economy it is unpredictable because of the wane in petrodollar exchange, among other things. The longer domestic tensions and governmental confusion or strange actions continue, the weaker the USD gets globally. The only reason USD has any global strength now is petrodollar exchange rates in petro transactions, and an artificially strong "service economy" that is pumped up by massaged values and doctored books.
Interested young people who want to weather domestic economic weakness would be wise to look toward wherever commerce is flowing globally, with support top to bottom in its supply chain. I would not look to "services" like banking or insurance or investment brokerage work. And I say that as someone who did a lot of work for insurance companies and worked mostly in services myself.
It's what I saw in the industrial defense side, on products liability for industrial products and chemical products, that makes me worry for those who are, say, younger than 50 today. Because that's where I saw the real deindustrialization at ground level.
What does that mean, exactly, "2d best" in "value-added" manufacture?
What does it mean compared to 50 years ago, best in all manufacture (generic, w/ exceptions)?
Instead of making excuses, why not seek and explain the problems? Recasting a dwindling system in empathetic terms doesn't help fix 50 years of de-industrialization. It doesn't fix 50 years of right-minded but badly implemented enviro laws/regs. It doesn't fix weird trends in US Atty Genl prosecutions of select businesses, while ignoring others in parallel situations. Et cetera.
No problem ever gets fixed by dressing up the problematic situation. "Warts and all" is a required POV for repair. Always.
On the main Q of who is expecting sustenance from SocSec, I would say young folks would be wise to see it as is, rather than how ideally SocSec is desired to work. And it has looked precarious since the 1980s, so that suggests fragility presently.
The economy on a national scale is fragile; relative to the global economy it is unpredictable because of the wane in petrodollar exchange, among other things. The longer domestic tensions and governmental confusion or strange actions continue, the weaker the USD gets globally. The only reason USD has any global strength now is petrodollar exchange rates in petro transactions, and an artificially strong "service economy" that is pumped up by massaged values and doctored books.
Interested young people who want to weather domestic economic weakness would be wise to look toward wherever commerce is flowing globally, with support top to bottom in its supply chain. I would not look to "services" like banking or insurance or investment brokerage work. And I say that as someone who did a lot of work for insurance companies and worked mostly in services myself.
It's what I saw in the industrial defense side, on products liability for industrial products and chemical products, that makes me worry for those who are, say, younger than 50 today. Because that's where I saw the real deindustrialization at ground level.
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I think you’re missing part of the point. Sure, we make the advanced stuff. But we don’t make the basic nuts, bolts, and washers that are needed to support the advanced stuff. Just look at electronics. We don’t make the chips here that are needed to make the complicated systems.For production method advancement, we went from hand-assembled stamped parts like this:
To precision-machined and Laser overlaid fastener location when applying carbon nanotube composite RAS skin like this:
We simply live in a totally different world when it comes to advanced manufacturing processes, automation, leveraging of input to output, materials sciences, and computing power plays a central role in all of it. This is why there was a lot of emphasis in Computer sciences while the old inefficient WWII machinery was sold off decades ago.
Even the 1950s and 1960s tooling in Aerospace moved rapidly away from WWII-era machines, especially when you look at the increases use of Titanium and the move into monocoque construction of fuselages, with high-temp engine cowlings necessary to insulate the airframe from radiant hear off the afterburners.
Then in the 1960s, we started doing Electron Beam-welding with one of the more well-known structures being the F-14’s Titanium wing box.
In the 1970s, we started using more boron-epoxy laminates for military aircraft, in addition to aluminum and titanium.
The most aggressive market sector for advancements in materials science and manufacturing methods has always been military aerospace. It really drives progress in electronics, materials, processing power/compactness, optics, RF sensors, man-machine interface, systems integration, production management, and supply-side restructuring.
There are technologies we developed in the 1950s that still haven’t been matched by any of the other industrial nations.
Long ago I was told- if you aren’t putting chips on the floor you aren’t making money.
Translate to today- if you aren’t putting chips on the floor you aren’t making the base parts you need for production.
Not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea.
For commercial, some of that might be true when we source subcomponents from Canada (very high value-added economy), Japan (same), Taiwan (same), and even European partner nations (same). For military and government contract systems, vehicles, aircraft, weapons, etc. the parts have to be made in the US.
Joe consumer (with an extremely limited exposure to the world) will never see military contract aerospace parts and systems at their local Mal-Mart or even auto parts stores, so their understanding of the industrial capacity of the US is closed-off to bottom segments of the market with all the cheap imported trash, and I agree, I miss the US when those things were made here.
Congress decided over many years to punish US companies trying to make consumer-grade products using regulatory overreach, while moving the manufacturing capacity of those plants to Asia and Central America in most cases. We’re in 100% agreement on that.
But it doesn’t change the fact that the US still makes the most advanced, value-added systems in high volume that we and many other countries rely on for defense, agriculture, transportation, finance, shipping, manufacturing, telecom, petroleum/energy, and computing.
And now there’s a major effort underway to re-shore a lot of industries that were off-shored, since the US isn’t interested in maintaining the security apparatus of Bretton-Woods anymore.
to answer your question OP, i’m early gen x, 1966….if you asked me before covid and the WEF crawled out from under their rock, i would have said yes i think i might make to SS age and collect
now days, no idea and i’m still 10 years out from full.
the carbon they want to reduce is us. so at some point they are going to pull the plug on this country…in some dramatic and final fashion.
now days, no idea and i’m still 10 years out from full.
the carbon they want to reduce is us. so at some point they are going to pull the plug on this country…in some dramatic and final fashion.
i just have this idea that the big $s on carrier battle groups are a mistake. am thinking subs are the way to go. this only based on the billy mitchell story and the well doced fact that generals ,and admirals,always try to fight the last war. hitler,japan and others putting $ in battleships in the 40s,the bolt action rifles in ww2,the way ww1 rifles were set up for napoleonic wars,bombers seem very vulnerable to modern interception tech,massed armor seems a thing of the past. i think the ukraine war shows the future of warfare and looks like russia has a handle on that. does the US? are china and india looking there? i hear the houthis and hezbollah are on the missile/drone kick. no idea if i am right but funding the MIC is always a priority in wash DC.
oops-way OT but ?
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