True - though I would say that the elderly have had a chance to earn and invest longer than the young, so it's not exactly like that's a nefarious plot. But a better tax structure would make that less glaring (same for the multibillionaires, only more so).
Total household wealth in the US is about ~170 trillion dollars. Those 12 own about 1% of all US wealth. Not shabby for a dozen people but the main issue of American society isn't the handful of people who hit the news but mostly the top 19% below them. Richard Reeves wrote a good book on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Hoarders
It's the upper middle class that fills educational institutions, prevents the construction of new property, hogs most of the old property and in general has impacted the upward mobility of the lower classes. Musk has a lot of issues, but he's not really getting in the way of people getting richer themselves.
It’s easier for the top 10% to blame the top 0.1% and absolve themselves, in spite of the knowledge that this changes nothing. Americans especially are averse to the idea that the middle class owes anything to anyone.
The ultra rich are also a problem. Wealth makes it easy to get wealthier. You can take unlimited risks. Copy the ideas of startups. Act in anti competitive ways. Live off loans. Etc
Those guys own squat compared to the assets the boomers own personally and fractionally.
That said, they do get to exercise infinitely more control and power than a bunch of old people who own non-voting shares and real property that's only valuable at the whim and pleasure of the local regulators.
well there's nothing special about any batch of humans in particular. what changes is the environment in which they function. so what exactly about the post ww2 environment led to this scenario?
As a person in that cohort, I suspect it was the booming economy that led us to think that growth would go on forever, so we could vote ourselves infinite riches on the back of our children and grandchildren, secure in the knowledge that infinite growth would bail them out.
It was only the ones that voted themselves infinite wealth and got it, and they pulled it up on most everybody in their same age group too way back then. IOW only a handful of boomers by comparison to all the rest.
When you do the math the vast majority of people over 65 have assets that are dwarfed by a halfway decent tech employee, after only about 5 years of employment.
Which is neither better nor worse, if everything went south right now you still couldn't say whether the retiree of 65 or the hard-working 25-year old would make it until they were 70 or not without running out of "runway".
Similar to today, tax cuts didn't "trickle down" to the majority.
Whom wouldn't have ever accepted if if they knew that, but the voters' behavior was obtained through the work of what many of us instantly recognized as ordinary propaganda, the misdirection just wasn't completely on steroids like the communists were using.
Many knew at the time that the budget could be balanced if tax cuts were heavily applied to wage income, and only to incomes below a certain level, with the difference made up by taxing commerce.
Which is why it was so popular.
Even if that was to include tariffs.
As we have seen, if there is any chance that tariffs need to be as stupidly high as they are now in some cases, they should have started being increased back then, no more than something like 1% per year where otherwise there was nothing.
It would have made for a whole lot more prosperity along the way, and conformed to the theoretical advantage the garbage-faced economists think it's having right now. Most likely without having ever to rise to today's actual percentages.
If tariffs had been done correctly and gradually, there would have been no pain progressing all the way to zero income tax on average Americans a bit earlier in the 21st century than now, and it would have been worth waiting for. Especially as soon as the budget got balanced it was very stupid not to take this kind of action which could make it consistently be a bigger surplus every year after that.
And think how many decades of sending once-valuable dollars to China in exchange for low-value trinkets could have been avoided. Dollars used to be worth a whole lot more back then (don't ask me how I know), the Communists got in on the ground floor by allowing a mere sliver of free-enterprise, then took in huge amounts of dollars faster than US wage earners were doing. Look how the value of all that hard work by American wage-earners back then has grown for the CCP by now, at the expense of average working Americans who actually toiled for that same dollar in the first place. There is no excuse for anybody involved to ever let the US slip to less than 10x as "rich" a country as China. All the equations which were meaningful were based on more like a 100x factor, how do stupid people get to occupy such important positions?
And this is just one of the things where it's good to have checks & balances to curtail the possibility of doubling the stupidity overnight.
> It was only the ones that voted themselves infinite wealth and got it,
It was also the ones who spent generations pressuring their govs for ever restrictive zoning laws, wanting to freeze their neighborhood in time by tanking new builds. This is very much pulling up the ladder behind them.
I've seen your observation be confirmed in other places besides California sometimes, so I think it's 100% a problem, I just don't know much about it or how widespread it is across the country.
There's probably 1000 other cuts that things are dying from which all add up.
If this is the biggest problem holding back the prosperity locally where development was already difficult, there's probably something equivalent in the rural communities where it's not so crowded.
When opportunity all recedes at once nationwide, it's got to be due to the sucking sound coming from Washington more than any one local area I would think :)
I've never seen that in action but it seems as corrupt and unfair as lots of other things that contributed to the snowballing lack of future opportunity in different ways. Very much pulling up the ladder like you have seen first hand, however the well-connected ones could pull it off they were getting it while the getting was good. With very limited oportunities to get on the gravy train as always, the remaining younger boomers never had a chance :(
In places like Texas and Florida it seems like development never stops for anything.
if i breathed in leaded petrol id behave irrationally too , personally i believe that sustainable growth could have continued for a few hundred years (and possibly have lead to a better system) had we not instead capitulated to those suggesting parabolic growth was anything but borrowing from the future
I'm looking forward to even more exposure to today's somewhat leaded aviation gas as I contribute to the transition being made to alternative fuels.
I'll use that as an excuse any time I need to behave more erratically ;)
>sustainable growth could have continued for a few hundred years (and possibly have lead to a better system)
Yes, I did the math when I was a teenager.
But both of these impending eventualities did not look like they would ever be recoverable after Nixon was there for not that long a time.
I guess I was right, and here we are :\
This is not what my father fought in World War II for, and the whole country went through, just to end up in deeper debt [0], with more irrational leadership than so-called shitholes, and failing to remain orders of magnitude richer than China :(
As we go along, a lot of 21st century financial things that might have been recoverable just a few years ago are slipping out of reach faster each day now. Sooner or later the bottom rung of this modern ladder will be out-of-reach and not coming back either.
[0] When the only reason for any debt at all is a temporary situation like the need to vanquish authoritarian dictators who need it so bad that freedom-loving Americans just can't stand it any more.
im not entirely sure that i parsed your smileys/double negations/insinuations as intended ... the irrational aspect was agreeing with psychopaths , those psychopaths will always exist and will not be kept in check by anything except for community enforced morality. the west honed a beautiful set of morals for thousands of years , then proceeded to throw those morals in the bin because tv said so. id feel bad for the west , however this does bring up the conundrum - is a propagandized (or otherwise hypnotized) populace liable for their own actions ?
Toxic materials can make you real wacky, but that has nothing to do with anything psychopathic.
Unless somebody puts some effort into combining the two, which does happen.
Psychopaths would have done damage whether they were affected by chemicals or not.
Now you do bring up a major conundrum which many people may not want to face at all, and would not know what to think no matter if it was true or false.
You make a legitimate observation whether that is coming from outside the USA or from freedom-loving Americans.
our viewpoints make a good discussion but our communication protocols arent properly matching up. i was trying to make the point that you just did - being fried in the head would increase the likelihood of silly decisions in all types of humans. one such example of a silly decision was collectively deleting rules designed to keep psychopaths in check, at the behest of psychopaths. thanks for chatting man, all the best
You completely missed GP’s point. It is very difficult to talk to many people of your generation. Flat art and flat people. Tetraethyllead may be a culprit.
It's easy to say this, and I am definitely down on the boomers, but I'd say the folks running Europe before WWI were probably a worse generation than the boomers.
https://archive.is/akHpQ
https://archive.is/https://www.wsj.com/economy/over-65-congr...
Plenty of poor older folks. Way to miss the mark. The battle is against class
Exactly. "No war but class war" applies also to generational war. I love the way Some More News tackled the subject : https://youtu.be/Pit-WT0pU34
Hmm, Musk, Bezos, Huang, and Zuckerberg are all younger than 65...[1]
1: https://www.newsweek.com/americas-12-richest-men-worth-combi...
Also Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Rihanna and may others the generation adores.
Beyonce is currently in the news for firing a stage manager of 20 years with no severance.
They are both true? Between the ultra rich and the elderly there are scraps for everyone else.
True - though I would say that the elderly have had a chance to earn and invest longer than the young, so it's not exactly like that's a nefarious plot. But a better tax structure would make that less glaring (same for the multibillionaires, only more so).
Total household wealth in the US is about ~170 trillion dollars. Those 12 own about 1% of all US wealth. Not shabby for a dozen people but the main issue of American society isn't the handful of people who hit the news but mostly the top 19% below them. Richard Reeves wrote a good book on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Hoarders
It's the upper middle class that fills educational institutions, prevents the construction of new property, hogs most of the old property and in general has impacted the upward mobility of the lower classes. Musk has a lot of issues, but he's not really getting in the way of people getting richer themselves.
Upper middle absolutely causes a lot of problems; surprised more people aren't focused on them
It’s easier for the top 10% to blame the top 0.1% and absolve themselves, in spite of the knowledge that this changes nothing. Americans especially are averse to the idea that the middle class owes anything to anyone.
IOW alot of the parents of the young people who are complaining quite a bit themselves.
Sorry, on HN I wasn't expecting any attention from somebody who is fully convinced that no young people have parents, or something like that.
All US billionaires make up like 8 trillion
The ultra rich are also a problem. Wealth makes it easy to get wealthier. You can take unlimited risks. Copy the ideas of startups. Act in anti competitive ways. Live off loans. Etc
Those guys own squat compared to the assets the boomers own personally and fractionally.
That said, they do get to exercise infinitely more control and power than a bunch of old people who own non-voting shares and real property that's only valuable at the whim and pleasure of the local regulators.
[flagged]
well there's nothing special about any batch of humans in particular. what changes is the environment in which they function. so what exactly about the post ww2 environment led to this scenario?
As a person in that cohort, I suspect it was the booming economy that led us to think that growth would go on forever, so we could vote ourselves infinite riches on the back of our children and grandchildren, secure in the knowledge that infinite growth would bail them out.
We are the worst generation.
>As a person in that cohort,
Me too.
>We are the worst generation.
Nah.
>Pulled the ladder up on those after them.
It was only the ones that voted themselves infinite wealth and got it, and they pulled it up on most everybody in their same age group too way back then. IOW only a handful of boomers by comparison to all the rest.
When you do the math the vast majority of people over 65 have assets that are dwarfed by a halfway decent tech employee, after only about 5 years of employment.
Which is neither better nor worse, if everything went south right now you still couldn't say whether the retiree of 65 or the hard-working 25-year old would make it until they were 70 or not without running out of "runway".
This is by design no matter how you vote.
Tax cuts, beginning back in the 80s, and continuing to this day. Broadly popular, contributing to the spiraling national debt.
Very accurate observation.
Similar to today, tax cuts didn't "trickle down" to the majority.
Whom wouldn't have ever accepted if if they knew that, but the voters' behavior was obtained through the work of what many of us instantly recognized as ordinary propaganda, the misdirection just wasn't completely on steroids like the communists were using.
Many knew at the time that the budget could be balanced if tax cuts were heavily applied to wage income, and only to incomes below a certain level, with the difference made up by taxing commerce.
Which is why it was so popular.
Even if that was to include tariffs.
As we have seen, if there is any chance that tariffs need to be as stupidly high as they are now in some cases, they should have started being increased back then, no more than something like 1% per year where otherwise there was nothing.
It would have made for a whole lot more prosperity along the way, and conformed to the theoretical advantage the garbage-faced economists think it's having right now. Most likely without having ever to rise to today's actual percentages.
If tariffs had been done correctly and gradually, there would have been no pain progressing all the way to zero income tax on average Americans a bit earlier in the 21st century than now, and it would have been worth waiting for. Especially as soon as the budget got balanced it was very stupid not to take this kind of action which could make it consistently be a bigger surplus every year after that.
And think how many decades of sending once-valuable dollars to China in exchange for low-value trinkets could have been avoided. Dollars used to be worth a whole lot more back then (don't ask me how I know), the Communists got in on the ground floor by allowing a mere sliver of free-enterprise, then took in huge amounts of dollars faster than US wage earners were doing. Look how the value of all that hard work by American wage-earners back then has grown for the CCP by now, at the expense of average working Americans who actually toiled for that same dollar in the first place. There is no excuse for anybody involved to ever let the US slip to less than 10x as "rich" a country as China. All the equations which were meaningful were based on more like a 100x factor, how do stupid people get to occupy such important positions?
And this is just one of the things where it's good to have checks & balances to curtail the possibility of doubling the stupidity overnight.
>>Pulled the ladder up on those after them.
> It was only the ones that voted themselves infinite wealth and got it,
It was also the ones who spent generations pressuring their govs for ever restrictive zoning laws, wanting to freeze their neighborhood in time by tanking new builds. This is very much pulling up the ladder behind them.
Not my downvote btw, corrective upvote actually.
I've seen your observation be confirmed in other places besides California sometimes, so I think it's 100% a problem, I just don't know much about it or how widespread it is across the country.
There's probably 1000 other cuts that things are dying from which all add up.
If this is the biggest problem holding back the prosperity locally where development was already difficult, there's probably something equivalent in the rural communities where it's not so crowded.
When opportunity all recedes at once nationwide, it's got to be due to the sucking sound coming from Washington more than any one local area I would think :)
Is that what hapened in California?
The whole state?
How bad has it been everywhere else?
I've never seen that in action but it seems as corrupt and unfair as lots of other things that contributed to the snowballing lack of future opportunity in different ways. Very much pulling up the ladder like you have seen first hand, however the well-connected ones could pull it off they were getting it while the getting was good. With very limited oportunities to get on the gravy train as always, the remaining younger boomers never had a chance :(
In places like Texas and Florida it seems like development never stops for anything.
if i breathed in leaded petrol id behave irrationally too , personally i believe that sustainable growth could have continued for a few hundred years (and possibly have lead to a better system) had we not instead capitulated to those suggesting parabolic growth was anything but borrowing from the future
What a coincidence ;)
I'm looking forward to even more exposure to today's somewhat leaded aviation gas as I contribute to the transition being made to alternative fuels.
I'll use that as an excuse any time I need to behave more erratically ;)
>sustainable growth could have continued for a few hundred years (and possibly have lead to a better system)
Yes, I did the math when I was a teenager.
But both of these impending eventualities did not look like they would ever be recoverable after Nixon was there for not that long a time.
I guess I was right, and here we are :\
This is not what my father fought in World War II for, and the whole country went through, just to end up in deeper debt [0], with more irrational leadership than so-called shitholes, and failing to remain orders of magnitude richer than China :(
As we go along, a lot of 21st century financial things that might have been recoverable just a few years ago are slipping out of reach faster each day now. Sooner or later the bottom rung of this modern ladder will be out-of-reach and not coming back either.
[0] When the only reason for any debt at all is a temporary situation like the need to vanquish authoritarian dictators who need it so bad that freedom-loving Americans just can't stand it any more.
im not entirely sure that i parsed your smileys/double negations/insinuations as intended ... the irrational aspect was agreeing with psychopaths , those psychopaths will always exist and will not be kept in check by anything except for community enforced morality. the west honed a beautiful set of morals for thousands of years , then proceeded to throw those morals in the bin because tv said so. id feel bad for the west , however this does bring up the conundrum - is a propagandized (or otherwise hypnotized) populace liable for their own actions ?
Toxic materials can make you real wacky, but that has nothing to do with anything psychopathic.
Unless somebody puts some effort into combining the two, which does happen.
Psychopaths would have done damage whether they were affected by chemicals or not.
Now you do bring up a major conundrum which many people may not want to face at all, and would not know what to think no matter if it was true or false.
You make a legitimate observation whether that is coming from outside the USA or from freedom-loving Americans.
our viewpoints make a good discussion but our communication protocols arent properly matching up. i was trying to make the point that you just did - being fried in the head would increase the likelihood of silly decisions in all types of humans. one such example of a silly decision was collectively deleting rules designed to keep psychopaths in check, at the behest of psychopaths. thanks for chatting man, all the best
Now it's very clear.
I new you were very sensible the whole time :)
peyton is right, and it's worth it to put in the effort to improve communication
You completely missed GP’s point. It is very difficult to talk to many people of your generation. Flat art and flat people. Tetraethyllead may be a culprit.
It's easy to say this, and I am definitely down on the boomers, but I'd say the folks running Europe before WWI were probably a worse generation than the boomers.