You could start taxing them. Especially the rich ones.
You know that’s an option, right?
Or make them pay for their own winter heating.
Yeah, except it’s the rich assholes in power that would have to pass that kind of reform.
I mean, yeah. That kind of reform.
Good thing there’s other options.
Or we can give them lots of money for being old.
They didn’t fight in two world wars to not be given free money.
The Boomers fought in world wars?
In utero, maybe.
They didn’t fight I just said.
Sorry, the double-negative threw me for a loop.
It was just a joke. It was intentionally misleading, but I should have worded it better.
Sad thing with doing that, is they will be screwed over. Cool beans, but it won’t go away and you’ll be double screwed over. It won’t fix anything for the next generations. These billion dollar companies need not exist anymore. They do nothing but harm anything they infect
It’s not an option… Look at the average age of our “representatives”.
One thing these kinds of articles that are designed to stoke generational conflicts never mention is that rich people live longer. Like, obviously older people would be proportionally richer, the poorer people from that generation are dead. Also, friendly reminder, all this stoking of generational conflicts does is distract us from the real divide in society.
Regardless of the electoral politics, as Chris notes, the important challenge in social policy is helping people who won’t benefit from wealth transfers from wealthy relatives, rather than engaging in fantasies about “generational warfare”. What matters is not generations, but class.
Couldn’t agree more, though I would say it also distracts from the need to highly regulate capitalism at large, i.e. encourage reinvestment in employees (pay at least in line with inflation, training, etc) over shareholder dividends or CEO bonuses
This is relevant so not just those at the very top (irrespective of generation) will benefit from economic growth
Older people tend to be richer because they’ve had more time to earn and save money. Compare a 20-year-old to a 40-year-old. Both spent about 20 years being a kid, growing up and going to school, but the 40-year-old had an extra 20 years after that to earn and save money. You can do the same comparison between a 40-year-old and a 60-year-old, but take all the money the 60-year-old earned in the first 20 years of working and invest it in the stock market for the next 20 years, while also continuing to work.
Wealth can build like crazy. If you invest at 7% average annual return, you’ll double your money in just over 10 years. At 10% the doubling period is just over 7 years. Now consider that the S&P 500 had an average annualized return over 10% between 1957 and 2023, and that 60-year-old’s 20 year investment would multiply by 6.7x.
Digging a hole of debt deep enough to contain an ocean isn’t “hitting the jackpot”.
It basically is when you’re not the one who has to deal with that debt.
I’d liken it more to a bank robbery.
