Gerontocracy is fundamentally an issue of the few holding more than their fair share of wealth and power at the expense of others and pulling the ladder up behind them. It is a class issue same as everything else.
We’ve got Sam Altman and Taylor Swift in the millennial category off the top of my head. Elon Musk is Gen x, not a boomer. So boomers have Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia at the moment, but soon they’ll go to gen X and the problems will perpetuate. Oh, Googles Ceo is Gen X as well
Yes, and once boomers start dropping dead, gen Xers will be fighting tooth and nail to hold on to their slice of the state pension ponzi at the cost of everyone below them on the ladder the same as boomers did. That does not change my point at all.
There is no fair and equitable world in which state pensions can continue working the way they work now. The system was built on the expectation of infinite growth with every generation being larger than the last.
I imagine you’re not being entirely serious, but I fail to see how that is anything but yet another inventive way of kicking the can down the road so that boomers don’t have to deal with it.
So it’s honestly something I’ve been noodling about for a while, which is how to manage a soft landing from the current capitalist system given the overall trend of population decline and how capitalism as it’s currently structured can’t handle a sustained decline like we’ll eventually be looking at.
The best vision I can come up with (and this is US-centric since it’s what I know best of course) is to first expand Medicare to all, next expand SNAP/Foodstamps benefits to all, then expand the housing assistance programs to all. Somewhere in there a universal pension and later on a universal income. This would decouple working class folks’ everyday and long-term needs from the wider economy. Basically eliminate the micro-economy so that the macroeconomy can do whatever it will do without too much pain for everyday people
That makes more sense. I was thinking printing money only to pay pensions, which honestly seems like something European social democrat parties might actually do.
Yeah, if we saw something like an unavoidable 25% tax on all wealth over $300 million, we would see around $2.5 trillion in taxes that could be distributed as a universal base income that would place $17,857 per average household (2.5) in the U.S.
If we actually combated housing prices, that could potentially cover housing everyone in the U.S. from that alone, then retirements would only need to cover food costs. There are a lot of changes that would need to be made, they just won’t come until the last second when people are dying in large enough numbers to make people do something.
I see you’re talking about US numbers, but the US doesn’t really have a state pension system in the same way that many other countries doo. Maybe that’s the confusion here.
You’re the only one who’s confused here. You’re talking about boomers like that is a meaningful category of person rather than people who just so happened to be born in a certain period. It’s like saying “Most parents are adults”.
You’re saying that as if it makes any difference whether I talk about boomers or pensioners. The two are currently synonymous and we live in the present, not in the future. In the future when boomers are dead, if this problem still exists I will be using some other word.
Even though it’s irrelevant, I will try one more time. Boomers and pensioners are not synonymous. Boomers are just people who were born in a certain period, not a class. There are people older and younger than boomers collecting state and private pensions.
Them being born in a certain period is actually very relevant here, because the state pension system as it works in many EU states (and, to my understanding, many other countries like Japan too) allowed boomers specifically to pay in way less than they are getting out. This was then conveniently adjusted so that millenials and the younger half of gen Xers pay in more than they will get out, because their payments are used to finance the pensions of those above them on the ladder.
In most/all of these countries boomers are a massive voting bloc and politicians are consistently either doing nothing about the issue or making it worse. While there are populistic aspects to it, young Europeans have a plenty of valid reasons to hate boomers.
Neither of those are billionaires.
Gerontocracy is fundamentally an issue of the few holding more than their fair share of wealth and power at the expense of others and pulling the ladder up behind them. It is a class issue same as everything else.
We’ve got Sam Altman and Taylor Swift in the millennial category off the top of my head. Elon Musk is Gen x, not a boomer. So boomers have Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia at the moment, but soon they’ll go to gen X and the problems will perpetuate. Oh, Googles Ceo is Gen X as well
Yes, and once boomers start dropping dead, gen Xers will be fighting tooth and nail to hold on to their slice of the state pension ponzi at the cost of everyone below them on the ladder the same as boomers did. That does not change my point at all.
There is no fair and equitable world in which state pensions can continue working the way they work now. The system was built on the expectation of infinite growth with every generation being larger than the last.
With the projected population decline, the inflationary effects of creating money in order to pay pensions could actually be beneficial
I imagine you’re not being entirely serious, but I fail to see how that is anything but yet another inventive way of kicking the can down the road so that boomers don’t have to deal with it.
So it’s honestly something I’ve been noodling about for a while, which is how to manage a soft landing from the current capitalist system given the overall trend of population decline and how capitalism as it’s currently structured can’t handle a sustained decline like we’ll eventually be looking at.
The best vision I can come up with (and this is US-centric since it’s what I know best of course) is to first expand Medicare to all, next expand SNAP/Foodstamps benefits to all, then expand the housing assistance programs to all. Somewhere in there a universal pension and later on a universal income. This would decouple working class folks’ everyday and long-term needs from the wider economy. Basically eliminate the micro-economy so that the macroeconomy can do whatever it will do without too much pain for everyday people
That makes more sense. I was thinking printing money only to pay pensions, which honestly seems like something European social democrat parties might actually do.
Yeah, if we saw something like an unavoidable 25% tax on all wealth over $300 million, we would see around $2.5 trillion in taxes that could be distributed as a universal base income that would place $17,857 per average household (2.5) in the U.S.
If we actually combated housing prices, that could potentially cover housing everyone in the U.S. from that alone, then retirements would only need to cover food costs. There are a lot of changes that would need to be made, they just won’t come until the last second when people are dying in large enough numbers to make people do something.
I see you’re talking about US numbers, but the US doesn’t really have a state pension system in the same way that many other countries doo. Maybe that’s the confusion here.
You’re the only one who’s confused here. You’re talking about boomers like that is a meaningful category of person rather than people who just so happened to be born in a certain period. It’s like saying “Most parents are adults”.
You’re saying that as if it makes any difference whether I talk about boomers or pensioners. The two are currently synonymous and we live in the present, not in the future. In the future when boomers are dead, if this problem still exists I will be using some other word.
Even though it’s irrelevant, I will try one more time. Boomers and pensioners are not synonymous. Boomers are just people who were born in a certain period, not a class. There are people older and younger than boomers collecting state and private pensions.
Them being born in a certain period is actually very relevant here, because the state pension system as it works in many EU states (and, to my understanding, many other countries like Japan too) allowed boomers specifically to pay in way less than they are getting out. This was then conveniently adjusted so that millenials and the younger half of gen Xers pay in more than they will get out, because their payments are used to finance the pensions of those above them on the ladder.
In most/all of these countries boomers are a massive voting bloc and politicians are consistently either doing nothing about the issue or making it worse. While there are populistic aspects to it, young Europeans have a plenty of valid reasons to hate boomers.
That makes no sense unless you are too stupid to use the correct term, which you are not.