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Boomers have too much and are too entitled. I was thinking the other day how we live in a stone age primitive communism tribe where the village elders get way too much deference. As people age, politics insulates them from economic consequences. First at 45 they are afforded half-UBI like middle management positions, which 20 year olds could easily do but can never get because they're essentially handouts for middle aged people. Then they hit retirement age and they live off the backs of young workers. I believe that old people are a burden and young people should clear them out and take their wealth if they don't demonstrate utility to the young, who are the ones with the thumos and the vitality and the ability to make war and innovate. What do we need old people for, their life experience? We have ChatGPT for that.
Smart young people should take old people UBI and use it to launch careers, get married, and start families as well. The money is wasted on the elderly, who will never do anything for the human race.
One day you'll be old too, so I'd be cautious of discounting old people as mostly just a burden.
Funnily enough this isn't a new idea. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of the Futurist movement of the early 20th century asserted in his Manifesto of Futurism the idea that the old were useless and that it was the young with creativity, strength, and innovation.
He was 32 when the manifest was published. The guy lived to 68 and went on to fight in both world wars, enter politics, write books and poems, have a family, and continue to advocate for futurism. So doesn't seem like he upheld this portion of his manifesto... otherwise he would've stepped out of the way after he hit 40. Its easy to demand others do something until you also have to do the same.
Anyways if we want to actually tackle what utility old people can provide, I'm going to say the nuclear family structure has been detrimental to a role old people have played for most of human history. Older people in an extended family structure can provide support for the family through housework, taking care of the children, companionship, and yes, knowledge counts too. Also, it is older folk that is going to have the most knowledge of family history and pedigree. For a lot of people knowing their family and history gives meaning and a sense of legacy and purpose in context of the wider world. ChatGPT is not going to have information about your family history. It should also be the role of older people to act as a glue that keeps the wider family connected. They have the time and pre-existing relationships to maintain the network of family and having access to such a network provides value. ChatGPT is not going to provide that network. Older people can also fill less desirable jobs and roles that need volunteers.
Consider all the inventions, works of art and literature, businesses, etc that have been created and developed by people in their older ages. Is the rate lower than the rate at which younger people create these? Obviously yes, but your claim was that the elderly will never do anything for the human race. It's also likely the success of work produced by old people come from having many years worth of experience in life. Do you think JRR Tolkien was capable of writing Lord of the Rings in his 20s? If yes, why didn't he do it in his 20s? He began his most famous work at around 62. Also, the average age of a successful startup founder is 45. This is after filtering out small businesses with no intention of growing large. Should the group most likely to have a successful startup not reap the benefits of their risk and effort in their old age? Why would anyone bother taking that risk if they aren't allowed to do so?
Also, does legacy mean nothing to you? Would you not like to have grandchildren, maybe greatgrandchildren and see to their growth and success? You don't think you'll be able to provide them any value other than your previously accumulated material wealth? Do you believe that you would serve them better by dying and giving them an inheritance than guiding their growth?
I'm not fully discounting your complaints either, because things like advances in medicine has caused older people to live longer than they used to which has increased the strain on social security. Couple that with less people having children and this is one of the great pressing problems of the 21st century. Personally I'd restrict voting power to adults that pay taxes and that'll probably address a good chunk of the issues you point out. Maybe even have it proportional to the amount you are taxed up to a cap. But I don't think "clearing" out old people is the solution. What exactly do you mean by "clearing" out old people anyway? Make it illegal for everyone over 40 to have a job? Let them starve to death? Mandatory assisted death over 60? It's not like basic resources are an issue - we currently grow enough food to feed 10 billion people, and if people aren't having kids then eventually the population is going to start shrinking. You might think old people are getting the in the way of young people, and to an extent that may be true, but is that the main factor?
For example, lets consider the high price of housing and rent. A common sentiment I see online is that the boomers are hoarding all the property so young people cannot afford homes. But is that really the main issue? The cities with the worst housing markets are the ones that tend to have the most restrictions and regulations on housing and rent. In a city like New York, rent control leads to a lot of empty apartments because it's cheaper for the owners to leave it empty than to spend the money necessary to renovate it to a livable standard from updated codes in NYC. LA has restrictions on the size of apartments and in San Francisco you can spend years waiting for a permit because a study has to be done on the environmental impact your new building will have on the local bird population before you can begin construction. That's not really an issue with the existence of old people holding homes as much as it is an issue with government mandated regulations making it harder to increase supply of housing. The homes older folks tend to live in are also cheaper homes in LCOL areas where their money can go further, while young people are more likely to be competing for homes in more expensive cities where there is more opportunities in their career. I haven't crunched the numbers to see what has the bigger impact but my gut feeling is that the restriction on housing supply due to not being able to construct enough new homes is a bigger factor than the housing supply being constrained due to old people buying up all the homes.
The real issue with Boomers(and Spiritual Boomers) isn't that they're old and entitled, it's that they're old and refuse to acknowledged that the ground game has changed.
To use a less(hah!) contentious comparison, look at the flood of male divorcees/widowers getting back into the dating game after ten years of marriage only to find that things have become an utter shitshow.
If Boomer's general reaction to the state of, well, everything, was to basically say 'Yes, things have gotten really horrible' and just nod along in sympathy, they wouldn't get near as much vitriol thrown in thier general direction. Instead, the ones who end up being the loudest say 'You're just spoiled/entitled/lazy/we had it worse', and when people start bringing out the receipts, rather than acknowldging anything to zoomer's arguements, they double-down and go 'NUH-UH'.
My favorite example on twitter was one spiritual boomer bragging about how the home he and his brother grew up in was perfectly affordable at 250k, only for someone to do the work and discover that it was 100k just 8 years prior. ... Yeah.
So, we'll see how all that will work out in the end...
I feel like I have a vague memory of essays by boomers saying something like this, but I've so rarely run into it that I can't remember, and I've certainly never seen it among boomers IRL. Not that I hang out with a lot of those, so that doesn't mean too much.
But, eg this past week, I saw some kerfuffle on the social medias involving zoomers complaining about boomers not understanding how hard it is, and when I looked into it, it was because some boomer said zoomers ought not spend $28 ordering lunch and even generated a realistic cheap plan to make their own sandwiches, and zoomers scoffed that that was basically concentration camp food. Every interaction of this type that I look into seems to play out like that, where basic financial responsibility and the most minor of suggested sacrifices is made out to be some huge ordeal. Notably, I've never seen boomers implying that this would solve all zoomers' woes, merely that those are the types of things they should do first before declaring that making it in this economy is impossible.
I'm personally a privileged millennial, who was lucky enough not to suffer the pains of the 2008 crash that happened around the time I started working. So I don't have enough personal experience with such stuff to weigh in on. But I certainly have the experience of sacrificing location and comfort for price in rental, sometimes spending nearly 2 hours in commute each way for work, doing meal prep and budgeting my restaurant meals, not ordering food for months, not paying for any entertainment subscriptions, finding used or free furniture from Craigslist, things like that, in my 20s and even 30s. They're just not that much sacrifice, and certainly I think my qol with all the benefits of modern technology and policework is better than that of boomers when they were young adults.
I sense that zoomers were too grown up being fed fearmongering that these were the end times, and COVID plus AI gave them a one-two punch right as they were becoming adults. Like generations before them, they were sold a false bill of goods about college being the solution to all their career problems, and there's certainly blame that deserves to land on their parents' generations to some extent for all of that except maybe AI. And so they're somewhat understandably weary of being told advice. But jumping at shadows is still jumping at shadows, and devoting significant energy towards criticizing others instead of criticizing oneself tends not to be all that useful for getting oneself out of a hole, regardless of who dug that hole or put one in there.
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Endless human conflict is based on this principle. It really never works out as intended.
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This is maximum spicy outside of /r/antiwork. To me, it reads: I want their money and it’s their fault.
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I'll be old someday and don't want to be "cleared out" in any sense. I don't want to work and save for decades just to have it seized by entitled youths who feel it is unfair that I have much and they have little.
Then don't be old and don't work and save for decades. Live now and create. Society is gray when the economy is dominated by penny pinching sloggers and idle old people. Imagine creative young people investing and building and doing their best to still contribute something positive in their 60s while living off of some savings.
Naa, I'm tired. Besides, if I did, you and yours would be complaining about old people hogging all the good jobs.
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One quibble with this, in the US at least, the vast majority of retirement savings aren’t just sitting in banks, they’re tied up in the stock market, ie, invested and “building”. This is true for most old and/or wealthy peoples money, which is why the “they’re hoarding wealth” argument is kind of silly in some ways; this generational wealth isn’t sitting in some Scrooge McBoomer vault, it is the fuel that drives the market.
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Fewer young men will take risks when they know the next generation will say "we don't owe you nothing, gramps".
No, they will take more risks because the future is more uncertain regardless of present actions when they're not getting a cushy OAP for having wrinkles.
A world where none of your choices can affect the stability of your life in the future sounds like something that will collapse after a generation in favor of the one that balances handouts to the young with UBI for the old.
No it doesn't. The smarter argument would have been „have you seen Africa?” My retort would be that the present economy is too sure in all the wrong ways so chaos would be an improvement. Then out of the rubble comes a well-ordered slow life history society, like Ancient Rome.
The old (specifically, old fathers) had ALL the power and wealth in Ancient Rome. It's a terrible example for your position.
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Motivation, that's what. The benefits and respect afforded to the old aren't an insult to the young, they're a promise that they'll be rewarded for working hard in their earlier years once they've done their time. One day, when the tonguing is done, we'll take our leave and go.
That's a weird, servile way to think. In my family, we work on credit and debt. First credit is issued, and we work hard because we feel like we owe a favor. We are generally too proud to work under a whip, chasing a carrot on a stick that is reserved for people who are suffering from the disease of old age (what good is it then?). I feel like credit is not being issued to young people in Western countries, therefore I owe nothing, and therefore I am relatively anti-social in my outlook towards the society and am more interested in looting it and swindling it legally than I am in contributing to it, since I owe it no favors.
Well, there is also credit being issued to the young - the very young, that is. We don't ask 0-to-20-year-olds to work to earn their daily bread, indeed we actively prohibit them from doing so. So the debt does exist - your 30-year-old self owes society his labor in exchange for it guaranteeing you a childhood where you didn't have to work in a Dickensian coal mine, or on a farm.
But to put it another way, the basic model of our social contract is that, out of an ~80-year lifespan, we would like people to contribute about half of that number to working full-time to the benefit of society. In exchange, they can enjoy a life of relative ease for the other half of that time-span. 40/40. It's intuitive, it's fair, it's attractive. Instead of 40 years of leisure followed by 40 years of labor or vice versa, however, we distribute the rewards on the time-honored principle of "half in advance, half when the job's done": 20 years of easy street from birth to graduation, then 40 years of toil, then 20 years of comfortable retirement in your golden years.
Splitting the difference in this way fulfills multiple useful purposes. Firstly, it includes (in your terms) both "credit" and "carrot" mechanics, thus appealing to both kinds of instinctive motivation. You should work hard because you owe society for your happy childhood, and because you still have some more comfort to look forward to later. Secondly, it concentrates the designated labor period in the years when people are fittest and thus when their time is more economically valuable. A 7-year-old gets as much happiness out of leisure time as a 37-year-old, if not moreso - and a 70-year-old doesn't get much less out of it than the 35-year-old, though admittedly he does get somewhat less. In contrast, the labor of a 7 or 70-year-old is worth far, far less than the 35-year-old's.
Above all these common-sense considerations, though, there is the even more basic point that most people like having something forward to in their future. Reducing this incredibly fundamental fact of human psychology to a servile desire for a carrot-and-stick model is bizarre and misanthropic (indeed, I had nowhere mentioned a stick/whip). Obviously I would rather be promised a few decades of comfort at the end of the road, than believe that nothing but pain and destitution awaits me once I'm no longer deemed to be useful. How you can get out of bed in the morning believing the latter baffles me.
No. Society does not pay for childhood, parents do. The parents need the credit from society, and parents-aged people can't get it. Therefore we have a low fertility crisis and people who are too old to be parents trying to have babies. It's unhealthy to have 35 and 45 year old new parents versus 25 year old new parents.
It definitely does not work like this. My parents paid for everything during the first 20 years while society only got in the way and demanding they pay more and I make less money. So, from my point of view as a married man who would like to become a father now: I am responsible for paying for my children, and society is not producing the credit for that that it should. It is paying me $150,000 less than my equivalent who is 15 years older, but that equivalent is not a suitable new father and his children should be capable of earning income by that age, or almost, because he should have had children 15+ years ago. As my children grow up, not only do I pay for them, society starts demanding that they and I do things which are disadvantageous and unnatural. Economically, they mainly serve as economic redistribution to all sorts of strange guilds, which we as a family don't owe. There is some sort of half-baked argument covering for this about this being good for my family, the economy, and the nation, which don't really hold water when examined. And the tab here is years of life and hundreds of thousands of lost dollars per family. And then when they are done with all of these things and I'm holding the tab, my children will be systematically underpaid and forced to pay for stranger old people's lifestyles, who have done nothing but steal from us as I have raised them, instead of having more money to use for my grandchildren and myself.
Nature provides for that plenty without this monstrosity of a redistribution system.
People need to look forward to the end of economic theft from themselves and the beginning of their OAP instead of looking forward to their children and grandchildren and personal plans unfolding? That's misanthropic.
No, you should actually earn it, not have it promised by the government.
I live my life now and have already accepted the terribleness of old age and death. It seems like others are still in denial about these as adults and would simply like to argue with and negotiate with Mother Nature.
Your parents, who will be old later, and to whom you will therefore owe a pension. What's your point?
To enjoy any those things aged 70, you need to be able to afford a comfortable living without having to work anymore. But more to the point, you seem to be flip-flopping back and forth as rhetorically necessary between "actually, old people don't need pensions to enjoy comfortable idleness in retirement" and "actually, old people's comfort doesn't matter, screw them, as soon as you're out of the labor force you might as well croak". It is the latter I primarily take issue with.
When they die I inherit? I actually owe them while I don't owe strangers? They won't nickle-and-dime me like strangers will at the expense of their grandchildren?
I believe both. Old people can be comfortable if they earn it, but unless they're my family I'm not willing to make the comfortable at my expense. All they did is take from me and my family.
Except you also say old people who worked and saved ("earned it") should be "cleared out." So you don't want them to be given anything, and you don't want them to keep anything they earned, you basically just want everyone but your parents put on an ice floe once they can no longer work?
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What do you mean by "earn it"? If you mean "earn it morally by contributing to society while they were able", sure. If you mean "literally personally earn the money they'll live off of in their elder years", we have a problem. There are plenty of working-class people who can work hard every day of their adult life, but for whom making enough savings to make a decent living on in their golden years is simply not a realistic outcome. Have these people "earned" a few decades of retirement? I say yes. I say society needs to offer them some guarantee of it if it wants young men to go into those lines of work, and they are necessary work. But that's going to look like a pension system.
(No, "get married and have kids" doesn't square this circle. Odds are their children will be living paycheck-to-paycheck too, the last thing Junior needs is another mouth to feed on his minimum wage.)
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Counterpoint: I worked at a broadly 'flat' tech company. Having thirty young and roughly equally-qualified engineers competing for middle-management positions makes for an awful working environment. Get the oldest to do it, as long as he's decent, and everyone can get on with work instead of agonising over reviews and stabbing each other in the back. Who's most senior is also semi-random, so you don't end up with the greasiest of the pack put in charge.
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For those wondering about the whole fertility thing, why people aren't having children... this post gives you one underdiscussed reason. How much sharper than a serpent's tooth...
I thought for a second that you meant people aren't having children because infertile boomers are hoarding the wealth from those who are young enough to marry and reproduce. For example, I married younger than most people of my generation, and we can't afford a wedding ceremony, or a child, and our marriage process still costed a lot of my net worth. I make about 95th percentile income for my age group and I am old for marriage by historical standards. We don't feel like we can afford to have a baby right now. So that would be a take based in reality, yes?
But then I saw that that boomer, who is known for his feeling of entitlement to his old-age pension, The_Nybbler, posted the comment, and I looked up the serpent's tooth quote, and ... my priors have not shifted on you.
„How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child:” I am a minority. The children are too thankful. Even if they were all like me, that would be no reason to not have kids. I still want kids. Mine will inherit my ideas. Is it a horror, that they will believe I should not exist on the dole for 30 years of retirement if they are struggling to afford to give me grand children? Not quite. That being a horror seems to only make sense if one is in denial about his mortality and the true conditions of old age. It is best for my Darwinian fitness to kill myself at age 65 for my grand children. If you do not agree, you will be replaced by those who do.
I am [not yet 35], make [~median household income] as the sole breadwinner, and have [2 - 4] children.
Obviously everyone is in a different scenario but barring very exigent life circumstances I have a hard time imagining being unable to financially afford to have children on 95th percentile income for my age. I'm very happy to chat about my lived experience in general terms if you're trying to figure out how to make it work.
It's (100% unironically) best for your Darwinian fitness for you to offer to watch the grandkids on the weekends.
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Without knowing more details, I don't know how much of this is based in reality. It certainly beggars belief that someone in the top 5% of income couldn't afford to have multiple kids, much less a single baby. My basic Googling says that this would be over $150K for someone in their 20s and over $290K for someone in their 30s. I understand that cost-of-living varies a lot, but as someone living in a medium-high COL area who has friends and family who are decidedly NOT in the top 5% (they certainly make less than me, and I'm certainly not in the top 5% in income) who have multiple kids, I don't understand how the math could work out to make it unaffordable.
That age entitled someone to an extra $140k a year shows everything that is wrong with this economy. There is no way they are „earning” that. That's village elder UBI and it's bad because people in their 20s need it to feed their babies.
I'm worth more than two people in their twenties at work. I'd say they're underpaying me in some relative sense.
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Usually, people who are older tend to make more money because they can provide more value by nature of having more experience and understanding of how to provide value. There's also greater replacement costs when it comes to employees that have been working at a company for a long time; someone who isn't all that productive but knows a specific company's systems well could be hard to replace and thus command higher pay than a productive junior member whose responsibilities are low enough such that they could be exchanged for another junior member, and older people are more likely to have worked at a company for a long time.
It's not as if older employees automatically earn more than younger ones for the same entry-level job, except for cases of some other factor that's often correlated. E.g. some possibilities: older employees are more likely to have experience negotiating for higher base pay, or they're more likely to have kids and get a sort of parent-sympathy bump.
There's a strong argument to be made that the current allocation of compensation doesn't properly reflect the actual productivity or value that these individuals provide. There's an even stronger argument to be made, written in blood, that no one can be trusted to make a reasonable judgment call on the justice of such allocation in an economy-wide scale that is better than what we have now.
AI might obviate all of these, but, well, modern AI is less than half a decade old, barely long enough to have gone to and finished college. These things take generations to turn around, not mere single-digit years.
Back to the actual point at hand, I'm still curious what your spending is such that you don't believe that $150K+ plus whatever your wife makes isn't enough to afford a baby. Your fixed costs for things like rent/mortgage and loans must be truly astronomical to make that be the case, and at least the former of those could be changed.
I don't make that much. I'm not American, and maybe younger than you're thinking. My wife doesn't work. Why should we be dual income so some Boomer can sit on a boat and our babies don't have a full time mother? Yet another demand these olds put on young couples that is ridiculous.
I pay a ton of taxes, almost all of it goes to education, healthcare, and old age pensions. The latter two fund the old, the former funds other people's children's daycare, and waste of time for teenagers, and a guild of strangers who feel entitled to employment in that domain.
Then it's rent. We have space for a baby or two, so at least there's that. If we downsize, we don't, unless we live in poverty. I'm not living in a one room shack for the Nybbler's of the world who feel like they Earned their javascript money and like I don't deserve to get in on that because I was born too late.
My actual implementation idea is just to cut my taxes down to near 0 and increase old people taxes while slashing OAPs. How is that bloodier than the present redistribution system? Nobody in the West is doing early 20th century bolshevism.
This doesn't seem like the worst idea, or even a bad idea. I'd be curious to see the precise details and what economic models predict in terms of how this affects incentives. Perhaps you could solve your baby affordability woes by becoming a politician, then using that power to
steal from the governmentdirect money towards friends and family or make money through insider trading, because your ideas seem likely to be popular enough to have at least a decent shot at winning elections.The bloodiness in these things often come down to friction in implementation. I.e. the existing democratic system often prevents changes like this, because there are a lot of old people who vote, relative to not-old people. As such, it's usually just a matter of time before someone like you gets replaced by someone more extreme than you who calls for just
eating the richmurdering the olds, who can't really fight back all that well anyway. After all, who's easier to kill than the weak and frail?More options
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I actually agree with the basic thrust of your point - being rich in your 60s is nice but doesn't achieve much for society in most cases and younger people would be better off with more money for having children - but you are making incredibly strong and bad claims that are distracting from it.
Yes, someone in their 30s is usually worth 2x as much as someone in their 20s. They've had 6 to 10 years of seeing stuff actually happening in the real world, they've got some experience in when and why things work or fail to work, and they are able to reliably handle things without needing their hand held. They are less likely (though still distressingly likely) to decide that they've worked out how the world really is and everyone just needs to get out of the way.
I saw a recent paper measuring this claim in teachers. The difference between a teacher with 2 years of experience and 18 years of experience was 0.04 SDs. That's like half an IQ point. That's also like a correlation of 0.10 or less. Worker talent dominates, particular experience does not have that long of a tail (maybe 1 year matters but 10 is outrageous) or that big of an effect. Ultimately the experience narrative is the narrative which justifies the redistribution, but when it gets audited it fails just like the education system. All of it's looking like village elder UBI more and more.
Could they earn an extra 10% per year? Maybe. An extra 100% is an outrageous effect size.
In my industry there is a saying about some people having X years of experience and others having 1 year of experience, X times. Teachers, by nature of the job, nearly always fall into the second pattern -- each year is the same as the last. And they get seniority pay increases because they're public employees with unions. Most jobs are not like that -- if experience people get more pay, they're expected to do a better job.
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I too would be incredibly depressed and cynical were I to think that I've basically peaked and that in a decade+, I'll only be at most 10% more competent than I am today.
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That's because teaching experience doesn't do much to outcomes because, well, we've had that conversation plenty. The difference between a (good) lawyer with 2 years and 18 years of experience is a hell of a lot more than 10x, though.
I'm somewhat surprised (but not really - the answer is that people just don't really think much about these things) by how common it is that people just argue from incredulity that someone surely couldn't be worth that much more than someone else in terms of the job they do. Commonly with billionaires, or people who make $multimillion salaries compared to, say, entry-level employees who make less than 1/200 of that.
Because, looking at one of the most fair and transparent jobs in terms of measuring performance - professional athlete - it's pretty clear that the top players really can be that much better. Even just making it to the pro level likely places you at least in the 95th percentile, if not 99.9th, and when you zoom in in that tiny sliver of humanity, you realize that the gap between the top players and the median players is HUGE. In 2000, Pedro Martinez wasn't just the best pitcher in MLB, he was better than the 2nd best pitcher in MLB by a gap larger than the one between the 2nd best and the median MLB pitcher, according to most stats. If you look at other top-level talents like Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan, similar phenomena seem to occur.
Given that the gaps are this big in just that tiny top sliver, it tells me that the productivity gap between the very top and the median worker (who's probably what, in the top 30% of everyone of similar age?) is likely to be absolutely enormous. I could absolutely believe that one individual is actually a million times more valuable to a company than a junior employee in terms of value created and thus, in some cosmic sense, "earned" that salary that's a million times higher. There's no real good way of quantifying this in a rigorous and fair way, but, I'll say, I have no incredulity when it comes to this notion.
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Proof?
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I think you copied-and-pasted the wrong link.
Sorry, repaired it. It's figure 1 I think at the bottom.
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The key word is 'feel'.
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I'm not a boomer, and I don't have a pension. I was also never middle management, for that matter, although the idea that it is "half-UBI" for the old is pretty laughable. And I didn't expect your priors to shift because integer ones never do.
No, it's really not. It's that word "feel" that gives it away.
You're over 40 and have savings and a house. Under the new rules, that's a boomer. I'm a decade-ish younger than you and a boomer as well.
Goddamit this is GenX erasure!
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I think I'm going to have to come up with some jokes to associate people making these claims with the University of Oklahoma, or the state more broadly.
What about USS OKLAHOMA, which is sadly not an OHIO-class SSBN?
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If you manage to get a good mortgage in your 30s, you've found the pathway to being a boomer, sooner.
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You are over 50 years old. Gen X is Boomer. Get with the new hip lingo.
You just think young working couples, whom the world depends on, should be poor, while you sit around on a pile of „earnings” (which really do not survive worthiness audit anyway, although that's beyond the point), and stronger younger men are barred from competing for it except for through pandering to you. The problem with this is that it is more ideal biologically to cut you completely out of the loop at this point. Is that the nicest way to do things? No. But it is evolutionarily best, and we are much too tilted toward Boomer worship and far too removed from the law of nature or nature's God.
You are a self-parody.
I just think that the pile of earnings I worked for when I was younger is my pile of earnings, and do not somehow belong to the younger generation merely because they are younger. Your idea that we should have a world where only those who are on top at any given moment should have anything is dystopian.
But we kind of have that world right now.
They belong to you insofar as you can defend them. Historically, the old pay the young to do that (in various ways, not necessarily financial, but is a good chunk of the time). The fact they're currently refusing to (because they feel, perhaps correctly, they do not need to) and at the same time preventing any other independent development is, again, kind of the central issue.
I believe I've mentioned this before: when a society is in equilibrium old vs. young and to the degree that all modern development is zero-sum, TFR should be 2.0. Lower than that means the old aren't reinvesting enough (it's very clear that they're addicted to low-cost labor, hence their preference for infinity foreigners rather than focusing on domestic reproduction); higher than that means the young are burning through the capital too quickly and are on track to create this problem.
Except none of that is happening. Taxes are paid by the "old" -- well, really, the middle aged, but our angry Zoomer doesn't make a distinction
I do not find this claim compelling.
In Zoomer parlance, the Tax system is Boomer-on-Boomer crime.
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This is how gen Z and alpha actually talk. There is no gen X in the lingo. FWIW other 55 year olds I've spoken to have also expressed disdain for being called boomer so it's not unique to you.
There's a strong argument and a weak argument here. The weak argument permits sitting on bygone glory that can't be presently defended, but audits your earnings and finds that dotcom era webdev work was overpaid. The strong argument says that even if you invented the transistor and capitalized completely fairly from that, evolution dictates that once you are done producing with that money and reproducing with your gametes, it is no longer optimal to allocate those earned resources to you. They should be dispersed, and do become dispersed, in the state of nature. That's how aging and death works.
The old gods are harsh but not dystopian. What we have now is a dystopian for young people. In reality I don't support going all the way on Gnon's law, but I think it helps to present the pure case of it and then discuss where to actually set the points of divergence. We are currently pandering way too much to old people and it has to stop. Maybe the optimal point is to cut OAPs in half and re-organize the tax system to tax reproductive age income less and old people spending more. That doesn't mean everything is taken from you overnight and you die in your 50s but it also means men like me will not be your slave while you sit on a boat somewhere into your 90s, having been retired for decades.
No wonder they're poor.
There's no argument at all for young people to judge the worthiness of work done by old people long ago with an eye to confiscating the fruits of their labor.
Ah, but most of us aren't dead yet. And before you suggest "that could be arranged", you might want to consider that if you were in any position to arrange it, you wouldn't be poor.
Nobody wants to arrange that. I want to arrange for you to work more and pay more taxes and receive less wealth transfer from reproductive people. The pure state of nature is mentioned because you will object to this, but in reality you should be thankful we prevent roving gangs of young people from taking your stuff from you. Therefore you owe us more and we owe you less.
Like I said, I prefer the strong argument. But on this point, I don't need to analyze old people's labor, I can just analyze labor right now. I'm convinced most of the economy is just a circus and is pretty far removed from serious natural laws. The economy should be in service to improving the human race but 95% of economic activity is not that. That means a lot of people make a lot of money producing no value, since I only count value as human race improvement. This point meets a brick wall with most people though because you can't make a man understand what his salary depends on him not understanding.
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Social security tax hasn't increased since 1990.
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I'd like to see more young politicians. Even if most boomers keep electing boomers, the other generations combined could elect a young millennial or even Gen Z.
Young politicians have less worldly experience and more impulsiveness, but more familiarity with recent worldly changes. In these times, which are changing faster than previous decades, this is important. Young politicians would also be more popular among young people, who (like the graduates mentioned above) need optimism and relatable leaders. And there would still be old politicians to mitigate their deficiencies.
I suspect a big reason tech isn't being regulated well, isn't corruption (although that's also a reason), but because old people don't understand its effects.
Yeah, we def need more AoCs and David Hogs. How about Hasan Piker?
I'd like more young politicians and public figures who are better role models.
I think they're not good, but better than the average establishment Democrat.
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