I don’t even know if it’s sustaining them long enough to draw labor. If anything it’s milking boomers for childcare costs and killing the kid as soon as they’re of age so they now also have to pay a lot for a funeral.

Well duh. It’s a system designed to sustain you just enough to draw labor from you; there are bound to be increased margins of error on that “sustaining” as the labor they want to draw gets higher and higher.

Marx talks about this a good deal in Capital, how “labor power” is an elastic category. Capitalists always want to push it downward by paying workers less, and this inevitably kills some of them.