Yeah, and property markets can’t boom the way they did any more. Rents eat up more of the income of tenants than ever before. Can’t squeeze blood out of a stone.
Property values may continue to go up to the point where only institutional investors can afford them, but rents can’t get infinitely high and they’re already approaching what markets will bear.
The crazy part is all of these covert ads I see on social media now about eliminating property taxes for retirees. They're the wealthiest segment of the population and they've had the easiest road with cheaper college and housing and full SS, and now they want another break.
Just being realistic. When they ran a man against Trump he won. In both cases where they ran a woman she lost. That's their failure. Maybe do what the voters want, ya know?
You're drawing sweeping conclusions from limited data and acting like it has any basis in reality.
How's this Biden underperformed downballot races in 2020 and Harris overperformed incumbent administrations around the world in 2024. Maybe we just shouldn't run anyone associated with the Obama Administration or over 65? At least those arguments have additional data supporting them.
It is crazy to key these things to age. The argument is that many elderly are less prosperous and can lose their homes to property taxes, etc. Fine. But that is no reason to give a gift to everyone elderly without regard to their wealth. The $6000 per person tax income tax deduction given to those over 65 by the republicans in their latest tax law is absurd.
Yes, and I see ads about how we need to increase social security benefits. Never mind that the program is headed toward insolvency. The boomers, who had access to affordable housing, education, and a remarkably strong labor market, now want even more money in social security, despite knowing that the program is already bankrupting the country.
Aren't rents by design always adjusting to "what the markets will bear"? Are vacancy rates and unhoused % a proxy for the difference between current rents and what the market will bear?
They are, but historically markets were softer than they are now. Covid unleashed a historic wave of greed in this country and every owner decided to see just how much they could raise prices. It turned out that the middle class was saving some money every month, so there was still value to extract.
They are but there is a relatively recent irrational expectation that they have to fully cover the mortgage costs of the property, which at least where I'm from didn't use to be the case until after covid. STRs have made this expectation even worse but that will fix itself when eventually we get a global recession where traveling will be the first discretionary expense cut.
How is it irrational for landlords to expect to not lose money when considering mortgage, property taxes, maintenance costs and time spent on property?
Oh the best part of this is for the first time new homes are now cheaper than old ones. The builders are going to have to hit their record profits If they want to offload their assets before their competitors.
> it's the result of decades of booming equity and property markets.
That is objectionable. That doesn't happen in a vacuum. It means that later buyers are paying a higher price.
And yes, Boomers have always voted to reduce their taxes at whatever point they happened to be in. Income taxes in the 80s (as Boomers started making real money). Capital gains and housing as they bought property and equity in the 90s. Inheritance as their parents died in the 2000s.
> it's the result of decades of booming equity and property markets.
Which... The boomers created for themselves at the expense of future generations. It's not like the boomers had that early lesson about political power and then they just proceeded to not do anything with it. They've been influencing the direction of the US for over half a century now.
The generation spent decades ensuring they got everything, while everyone not them got the scraps. Well, they're old now, and they want to look around and see the next generation to receive the torch. But there isn't one. Most "intelligent" people are pursuing a tiny number of opportunities in markets with a lot of money, while almost every other domain people need to actually run society has less and less people practising it by the day.
It's like, yes. If you as a generation decide to burn the full capacity and good will of an empire in one generation to make just that generation richer, the the next generation will not have that capacity and good will. Then when those same boomers look at the world and go "This isn't the world I grew up in..." Fuckin obviously not. When you actively spend your life destroying your own world, you're likely to be successful.
This is the classic case of turning the population against each other so they don't fight the real enemy. There are plenty of poor boomers. There are plenty of well off younger people. Objecting to positive treatment of somebody because of age bracket is as nonsensical as flipping a coin to determine benefits.
While this is obviously due to the accumulation of stock and property over a lifetime, maybe younger generations SHOULD VOTE in the same proportion as the elderly and exercise their political clout to ensure representatives pass more equitable laws. After all, the elderly are only going to decline in numbers.
What made boomers unique in history, is that they completely overwhelmed the older generation in numbers. By the time boomers turned 25~30 they had overwhelming political power. Sure, the older generations resisted the boomer ideas, but all society and political party had to pander to their needs and desires. They've held on to that power for decades and decades.
Millennials are a large generation as well, but they weren't overwhelmingly larger than their parents.
That is the difference that is easy to overlook and makes a lot of boomer advice so tone death and useless.
I guess that could mean Gen A and onwards will face a lack of block voting power as their population shrinks compared to previous generations in developed countries.
This is the part that fascinates me. That older cohort advantage will continue and increase with declining fertility rates.
You'll have generations that go through that are hampered by policies that favor the elderly at the expense of the young. Then they'll hold the power eventually when they're of age and aren't likely to dismantle the benefits they waited and paid for.
yes and makes it harder for the younger generations to in turn have kids and build a family - thus reinforcing the top heavy population pyramid. A cycle of demographic collapse that, absent major intervention, may lead to humanity simply evaporating.
When the impacts of fertility rates come up, I always try to envision it happening when Millenials are the oldest cohort. When people get into these discussions and envision boomers supporting bad policy, it becomes hard to separate out the emotional aspect of it. People just assume the worst of the boomer generation and how they won't change anything.
But its really hard to seeing the Millennials being the dominant voting block and suddenly reversing things. By that point, they'll probably be seeing their retirement years being much harder than what their parents had. They won't see themselves as the bad guys as they'll see themselves as better than the boomers, and you can sense frustration with younger generations not appreciating how hard millenials had to battle the older generations on basic rights, especially from a younger generation, all they'll see is insufficient climate action and decades of mismanaged finances.
Eh the most likely outcome is that small cohorts of parents will exit from the system, strip it of resources, and use those resources to raise their kids. Concretely, that looks like founding AI companies or crypto scams, redirecting the pension funds and 401ks of retirees into buying them, rugpulling, and using the cash gained to fund private schools for their children.
The system's doomed, but individual groups within the system can usually find ways to survive at the expense of everybody else. The drive to survive and pass on your genes is usually a lot stronger than the drive to be good to strangers. On a side note, this is how lying and sociopathy continue to propagate within the gene pool.
This is a real concern for public education. In 1960 almost half of American households were families with kids, and many had 3-4 children. Today that number is barely 25%, and < 18% are married 2-parent households. It's hard to maintain political support for a large budget line item when < 20% of the population benefits from it.
We're already seeing this with continued neglect for public schooling and an exodus to private schools.
The 26th amendment, in 1971, was the fastest ratified amendment in US history. Lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, caving to the Me Generation's demands. The Boomers carried an effective political plurality for decades, and mostly leveraged it on intergenerational wealth transfer through tax policy and financial deregulations which benefitted them.
When young, they demanded massive income tax cuts. Getting older, deregulation of real estate in favor of gambling with it (which culminated in the 2008 recession), Medicare Part D as they approached retirement (taxpayer funded Viagra and Cialis), axing the estate tax as their frugal Great War saver parents were about to pass to maximize inheritance, and now are loudly crowing for raising taxes on social security since they're withdrawing far more than they paid into the system and it's going insolvent.
Add on they went to college at low cost to free. Then pulled the ladder after them. Repeatedly voted for government that kept cutting taxes.
For all of humanity, as a group, working age people were always richer than the elderly. We passed social security to reduce elderly poverty.
We have so overcorrected. Now the elderly are the richest by far. Sitting in big houses paid off, renting their second house out, adding new kitchens and additions while their kids can’t even buy 1 house.
There are even places they are arguing to not pay property taxes.
The number one tennet of economics is that you get more of what you you incentivize. As a society, we have provide all sorts of subsidies for elderly and keep cutting aid to families. And then we wonder why society is getting older
They simply cared about their future and went out and voted for it, together, to make their future great. They are the wealthiest generation to have lived.
Something simple the following generations will never grasp.
i vote! but apart from getting involved in local and state politics, i'm in california, so my votes for president don't count. what is there left to grasp for people like me?
I agree on no taxes on social security though. Social security itself is a tax that you pay throughout the working years. When getting it back in older years, why pay taxes on it again?
You mean, the older generation are the ones who have amassed all the wealth and have and continue to be the ones in power, and very reluctantly, if ever, release their grip (see Senator McConnell, amongst others).
Not exactly.....Old People (over 65) only account for 20% of the US population, but 70% of them vote! Only 50% of 18-35 yrs old vote. Gen Z and Millennials need to get their asses in gear and vote!
Yes. Its called The Tax Cuts And Jobs Act in 2017. Trump's signature tax reform bill that has not only been the greatest transfer of wealth from the lower/middle class to the ultra wealthy, but also is THE main reason the national debt has doubled over the last 10 years
There've been increases in the amount of money workers can shelter in tax-deferred and tax-free (Roth) retirement accounts, with supplements for workers who are 50+. There are also generous tax breaks for Qualified dividends and long-term capital gains that don't help 25 year olds who don't have cap gains yet.
The above changes aren't all age-specific, but older workers tend to earn more, and are likely more aware of having a limited time frame in which to shore up their retirement savings. Thus, older worker-investors benefitted more.
So change the cap gain rates until you get money and then change them back
You realize most of capital gains is inflation and those dollars invested which have guava have already been taxed once (unlike wages and most ordinary income).
They show up to every local government meeting to block any zoning or regulation change that will allow any kind of housing to be built in their area, almost every major issue we face right now is a result of this
A study from Tufts found that while many young eligible voters age 18-29 in 2024 cited among the reasons they did not vote was because they either did not like the candidates or did not feel that voting was important to them, they also faced barriers:
did not have time off
did not have childcare
had problems registering
The most jarring comparison: 28% of young eligible voters who did not vote cited that they had conflicting work/school schedule, while that number logically decreased to only 4% of eligible voters 65+.
Actually, the group 65+ were more likely to cite that they did not vote because they did not like the candidates than the 18-29 group.
Because if it was a Federal holiday then the fuckers couldn't use election day like a weapon by removing our access to vote and keep us all bent over the barrel
Also, early voting. I think, the issue is people don’t know they have these options. Given the lines for day-of voting during non-work hours, I would think most people should prefer early voting.
Omg, just make it easier! What’s the argument against that? And no, many people don’t have a spare hour in their day (many wish they had an extra hour to just complete chores, let alone have time to critically think about politics. )
It’s 2026, we shouldn’t have to line up anywhere to vote.
Please explain your worry more? If we make it a holiday it’s fruitless? So sorry you’re worried about that, you have tough life.
(You should be thankful you have the free time to suck at riding bikes.)
I don't have any reason not to make election day a holiday. I just doubt it will improve voter turnout. I think most people who don't vote currently because they don't really care that much. A day off won't change that.
A lot of people don’t like it because it starts an arguments and they feel like it’s easier to not care. Many don’t want to deal with learning about it, so they don’t understand why it affects them when it does. Making Election Day a holiday probably will only help a marginal amount, it’ll definitely help, but a lot of people will just take that time off and do something more fun instead.
Please try to be more civil when discussing stuff like this. u/kershiser22 was being respectful responding to you but you still insulted them. This may just be Reddit, but this is an economic forum and a place for people to discuss important topics maturely, this is not the YouTube comments section or Twitter.
Some of us work 11-12 hour shifts and would have to commute to the polling place. Only a 30 minute lunch and no other breaks, which wouldn't be sufficient to get to the polls, vote, and return.
(I've already voted absentee, but take that away and I would have a rather major problem on Election Day.)
Sure, healthcare workers at a hospital will probably have to work, but retail pharmacy would likely truncate the hours enough to get to the polls.
Early voting by me is only open during work hours (M-F, 9-3) and the only early voting site in the county is a 30m one way drive from about 75% of the population because our suburb is just across a county border, and the county courthouse and other facilities are in a different town on the other side of the county.
When I lived in Texas I had to go after work, which at the call center meant 4:30pm if I was lucky. There were always calls waiting so clearing the queue typically took till 5 or 530, then another 30 to 45 minute drive in traffic for a couple of miles to then wait over an hour to stand in line.
I'm lucky I don't have kids I had to pick up.
Now in Colorado, the default is I get mailed my ballot and a blue book that outlines every item being voted on (for state and local issues, plus judges reviews) instantly it's so much more convenient and I can drop it off at a ballot box vs mail and have the post office throw out a "liberal" ballot.
Many places it's also open for WEEKS ahead of time. So you don't just need to make time during that 12 hours on one day. You need to make time during 12 hours on any of a bunch of different days for weeks ahead of time. And mail in is an option too.
The people I know who don't vote are simply mind-numbingly lazy and don't care.
I do vote, but I work a 12 hour shift and it definitely takes most of another hour out of the day to be on time and not leave early. Yes, technically my state protects leaving 2 hours early unpaid to vote with retaliation being illegal. There are a lot of moderate inconveniences, and my state has shortened early voting. They have also shortened how late voting stays open. The problem is that the increased unneeded restrictions will always push more and more people into nonvoting. It is why certain groups go hard against mail in voting. It is super convenient and leads to high turn out.
The younger generation need to look up voting laws in their states if they believe not having time off stops them. Also some (I won't say many anymore) states have mail in voting and early voting. At this point the only people who have excuses not to vote are those who legitimately live in states where voter suppression is hard in force.
>28% of young eligible voters who did not vote cited that they had conflicting work/school schedule
I believe they said that but that's kind of bullshit. In most places you can early vote and/or vote by mail for weeks ahead of the actual voting day. These people just don't make it a priority.
By requiring identification? Look I grew up jn. State where we had 1 voting day. 1. None on Saturday none on Sunday. The process where one even applied for a man absentee ballot required an in person visit to the local town municipal building. Somehow all of these greatest silent and boomer generation despite working difficult stressful jobs that sometimes
Involved a 3 way round trip
Commute into the city were able to magically wake their asses up and to go vote.
Now the democrats / town simply mail me a ballot like 6-7 weeks prior to the election. I received it in September.
In southern states they are already voting In person. Literally 3 weeks of voting plus weekend days.
What voter disenfranchisement? If you can’t find a way to either get a mail in ballot or over the course of three weeks when you’re in a demographic least likely to be employed (seniors, “economically” marginalized people, etc) to walk or uber your ass or drive yourself or ride a fucking bike to the local polling station or elementary school where ppl vote then maybe you’re too stupid and or lazy and shouldn’t be voting.
I’ll get downvoted for this, but do you think the Boomers did not have the same problems as they aged? Yet the civic engagement levels are vastly different even going back to Gen-X (my cohort). That said, voting day should definitely be a federal holiday.
I’m all for making voting day a holiday, but this just seems kind of insane.
I’m in the Deep South, where it’s supposed to be incredibly difficult to vote, and we have early voting weeks in advance, with support for mail in ballots and the polling offices are open 12 hours a day.
I understand restrictions are location dependent, but everyone knows when Election Day is. If voting it’s important to you, then you can make time to vote.
Agreed. I worked 10-12 hour days for multiple years when I was fresh out of college and I still made time to vote. Something like 22 states have same day registration at the polls. 47 states and DC offer early voting. 27 states have early voting offered during the weekend. I see kids with their parents at the polls every time I go, and I went with my parents to vote when I was a kid.
People are lazy and apathetic, that's the number one reason they don't vote, and many will refuse to admit it.
That's just an excuse. Early voting is widespread and can accommodate almost any schedule. Plus it's rarely busy in most places (outside of the start/end of the early voting).
Keep in mind that most of the people who need that time off to vote will still have to come into work for some shitty Election Day super sale for the aforementioned boomers.
The top 1% starts at $16M net worth, 50% of those households are over 65. So, if that’s who you’re talking about, you’re talking retired doctors and engineers. If you’re talking about billionaires, you’re referring to a specific set of ~900 people.
When you mix the two up, you end up conflating well off retired wage earners, roughly 700,000 households over 65, out of ~1.4 million households in the 1%, with 900 people who have over 62x that amount of money.
You’ll understand the nature of our economy a lot better when you realize that the 1% is a really large pool of mostly retirees who had good jobs and invested through one of the best periods of equity growth in history. The people you are conflating them with are the 0.001%.
They've been trying to make it about age for a while.
During Covid there was a whole "just let grandpa die" movement. The idea was to not have covid restrictions, not care about the mortality rate of seniors, and hope that not having restrictions helped the economy grow.
We're seeing that same sort of logic elsewhere. Many people with a humans=workers=economic units view see seniors as a pure cost center.
And young people who are struggling economically it's easier to sell them on the idea of cutting costs by shifting burdens to the elderly.
I don’t care. Tax the wealthy of boomers to make social security whole. Not working age people who have student loans, are priced out of the housing market, are supporting kids, all to support elderly who underfunded government all through their working years
Meh, boomers are collateral beneficiaries of policies that are designed to benefit the super rich. It is true they vote a lot, and the fact they they hold stock and land makes it easy to sell those policies to them. Mostly though, they benefit from the same policies that benefit the ultra wealthy. Make stock go higher. Get taxes less on capital gains. Favor corporate america above public good (thus favoring shareholders).
When boomers find themselves in a situation where their interests are not aligned with corporate america, they will get rolled over too.
While I agree I'd also say in a lot of places you only get to vote for the same old vultures and the whole system has been captured.
The main reason why a lot of young people don't vote is because they can see there's no viable alternative. What we should do is build that alternative because no ammounts of voting can overcome the system as it is today.
> maybe younger generations SHOULD VOTE in the same proportion as the elderly and exercise their political clout to ensure representatives pass more equitable laws.
A large number of younger people are going to get decent to big inheritances from those boomers, they won't like what 'more equitable laws' would mean for that. So I'm not sure you have a big enough, agreeable 'younger people' voting block.
Fewer will than think they will - end of life care and health costs are skyrocketing and have been wiping out retirement wealth, and it's completely intentional.
The boomers will cling to a miserable existence as long as possible and spend everything they have to do so, and there are entire industries that retooled themselves to accommodate this desire and wring them dry before they kick off.
>they won't like what 'more equitable laws' would mean for that.
#Truth. The idealism falls away the instant it affects your own pocket. For anyone waiting for the politics to change when the "boomers die of old age," the reality is that the current "youth" are just going to transition into boomer policies out of self-interest the instant they are the ones with power/privilege/property/assets, etc. that someone else wants to redistribute more equitably.
It's like that viral video where the interviewer went around UCLA asking for volunteers to sign an equity commitment form giving up their admissions spot to a member of the Tongva Tribe. Suddenly the ideal of equitable representation on campus was no longer as important. Similarly, look at how quickly the MAGA tribe turned when the price of gas/diesel shot up. It wasn't the other reprehensible nonsense this admin has done. It was the $2/gallon more they had to pony up out of their own pockets that broke the whole movement apart.
> Similarly, look at how quickly the MAGA tribe turned when the price of gas/diesel shot up. It wasn't the other reprehensible nonsense this admin has done. It was the $2/gallon more they had to pony up out of their own pockets that broke the whole movement apart.
Yup, and the same can be said for upper middle class left wing voters that are 'good on social issues' when it comes to higher taxes
Regardless of young people voting, it is responsibility of elected representatives to cultivate future prosperity which includes minding about career prospects, social mobility, and standard of living for youngest generations. Not just making donors and supporters happy to strengthen grip to power.
Definitely vote, and encourage other youngish people to vote! You don’t need to wait until you’re old and wise (or just old, as the case may be).
But about the number of older people:
> The number of Americans ages 65 and older is projected to increase from 58 million in 2022 to 82 million by 2050 (a 42% increase), and the 65-and-older age group’s share of the total population is projected to rise from 17% to 23%.1
Notwithstanding that the young have never voted in as large numbers as the old and there are obvious reasons for this (political awareness accumulating over time, time and ability to get to a polling station, suppression of candidates appealing to the interests of the young, etc.), the young ARE in fact voting in larger proportions these days than ever before, much to the consternation of the old and the media conglomerate owners who relied on the rate of youth vote not increasing all these years.
What made boomers unique in history, is that they completely overwhelmed the older generation in numbers. By the time boomers turned 25~30 they had overwhelming political power. Sure, the older generations resisted the boomer ideas, but all society and political party had to pander to their needs and desires. They've held on to that power for decades and decades.
Millennials are a large generation as well, but they weren't overwhelmingly larger than their parents.
That is the difference that is easy to overlook and makes a lot of boomer advice so tone death and useless.
The U.S. population aged 65 and older is projected to grow from roughly 58 million to over 80 million by 2040–2050. By 2040, approximately 1 in 5 Americans will be 65 or older.
Elderly will have the numbers.
Yes, so the elderly population is increasing not declining.
I assume you’re Gen Alpha giving the name calling. Take a walk if you can’t hold conversations without getting emotional.
Cohort theory is in play which is that generations don't actually get more conservative as they age, the cohort you're born into largely stays the same. Ie: Boomers were always conservative. Millennials are more than likely going to stay more liberal.
As long as a population has enough younger people to sustain growth, aging up (and out) doesn't really matter. The fact that Millennials didn't have enough kids to not make us getting older a burden is the problem. Your fact is missing the context of millennials are the largest generation of Americans, and they're not able to top that, due largely to economic factors.
I didn’t say anything about politics. I just said that the number of elderly will sharply increase.
I don’t don’t really care for which of the two parties they vote for. It’s not like there is a huge difference apart from culture war bs, and I am not American.
The population will have increasingly fewer younger people to sustain growth at a birth rate of 1.6 and falling.
So fucking tired of hearing this. Show me a political party/candidate who actually gives a shit about issues that impact young people. In most places in Canada they simply don't exist. Young people basically get offered a choice between a shit sandwich and a bowl of shit, and then people yell at us because we don't want to vote.
Not wanting to vote is the problem though, not the other way around. Supporting grass roots campaigns for people you care about is how they get elected. Just look at Mamdani.
> Young people basically get offered a choice between a shit sandwich and a bowl of shit, and then people yell at us because we don't want to vote.
Oh yeah, because us older folks just LOVE all the candidates. It's only young people who think they all suck. Yep, it's a unique problem for those poor young people.
No, politicians pander to voters. They don't give a shit what non-voters think. The number one goal of every politician is getting re-elected. For that to happen, you need to please the people who actually vote.
Biden pushed to raise the corporate rate back to 28%, and let the top tax rate revert back to 39.2(?)% from 37%. That's a more progressive tax structure.
Obama raised the long term capital gains rate to 20% from 15%, added a net investment tax for high earners (an additional ~3.4(?)%). Similarly, that's a more progressive tax structure.
Obama passed the ACA, allowing kids to stay on their parent's health insurance until they're 26, and generally expanded access to healthcare to millions of people who otherwise didn't have a good way to get insurance.
Democrats led the passage of the stimulus bills for both the financial crisis and COVID. The former limited the impact of the crisis and helped the US boom over the next 12 years, years where unemployment for new college grads was exceptionally low. The latter heavily benefited service workers (who skew younger).
Biden attempted student loan forgiveness on a massive scale, and when that was blocked by Republican lawsuits and the supreme court, he successfully implemented student loan forgiveness for ~5(?)m borrowers totalling about $200(?)m.
It's not the massive stuff I'd like to see (which has broad support in the Democratic party and broad opposition in the Republican party): public pre-k, single payer healthcare, labor protections for part time workers, and investment in transit unlocking larger housing markets (Chicago, for instance, has really effective regional commuter rail, and as a result is far less expensive a metro than its peer cities).
That stuff doesn't happen because young people don't vote as much as older more conservative generations. Gotta vote to get the results ya want.
Single payer does not have strong support the second you mention that taxes will go up, and even lower when you longer wait times were mentioned.
There are other systems that would be less destructive than single payer that would give people universal health care coverage. I have no idea why people are dying on the hill of single payer.
People like single payer because once you have it it's really hard to undo.
Longer wait times aren't a guarantee: first, wait times often suck ass in the US like they do elsewhere, second, that happens at the confluence of single payer (who pays) and nationalized health care (who administers services).
Taxes are a complicated idea, because it'd be a reallocation of money. Currently companies and individuals pay for health insurance and health care: those expenses would morph into taxes, and the net cost may decrease with a lower share of unemployed people (who still get health care, just generally it costs more because it's emergency care instead of primary care), reduced administrative cost, and reduced general complexity.
No arguments on there's being other ways to get the same outcome that may make more sense.
So they changed a few percentage points but kept the status quo where everyone gets fucked by billionaires and corporations. I love stagnant wages, an impossible housing market, and watching the Earth get destroyed by greed!
I see this so much in the UK as well … someone suggests something and the response is “but that will only raise X billion - that won’t solve everything” … like, yeh, obviously … but you gotta start somewhere and implement multiple things … no one is claiming there’s one thing that is a silver bullet.
This is why Democrats keep getting their asses handed to them. We need radical change now. Like something on the level that the New Deal was. Not these centrist pussies who pretend to care about the 99% while accepting corporate bribes.
Democrats keep losing because stupid fucking young people don’t vote because they’d rather throw a goddamn tantrum that their perfect candidate doesn’t exist. Fucking run for office if they don’t exist, or vote in the primaries for the ones that do exist, until then what you’re spouting is dumb as fuck and you’re part of the reason why nothing ever fucking changes. Fucking little whiny bitch ass Gen Z babies
I'm a Millennial and I don't have the fucking time to run for office because I already work two jobs and can barely afford to stay alive. I have approximately $0 to put towards campaigning.
Also...no candidate is owed a vote just because Orange Man Bad or whatever you want to say. There are way too many DINO assholes who are sucking off Isreal, tech bros, bankers, and landlords.
What you said translated “I would rather not vote for someone that would drive progress because they aren’t a perfect candidate for me, to allow the other candidate to win that’s going to put in place policies that will fuck me even harder”
Genius tier thinking. Enjoy your two jobs buckeroo.
Neoliberals don't drive progress - they stem the bleeding. Republicans lower the corporate tax rate from 40% to 25%, then a neoliberal comes and "fixes" it by raising it back to 30%. Rinse repeat.
>So fucking tired of hearing this. Show me a political party/candidate who actually gives a shit about issues that impact young people.
It's a chicken and egg problem.... if young people don't show up to vote, no political agenda is ever going to prioritize their interests (esp. at risk of alienating more reliable voting blocs). As someone who canvassed for Bernie, I can tell you that young people simply DO NOT TURN OUT when it matters most. At best, they are a fickle/unreliable voting bloc from year to year.
>Young people basically get offered a choice between a shit sandwich and a bowl of shit, and then people yell at us because we don't want to vote.
Instead of being "So f'ing tired of this," how about just show up to vote consistently in every single election no matter what. Who cares if they cater directly to you. Pick the least worst candidate every single time. The boomers do. Whether the candidate excites them or not, they show up reliably each and every single election. They stand in line, rain or shine. That is why every politician is tripping over themselves to give them whatever they ask for.
ONLY ONCE you get those attendance numbers pumped are campaign strategists going to start pitching the issues important to your voting demographic in order to secure that vote.
Because candidates cater towards the existing voterbase. Not people who don't vote.
If young people were a larger share of the voterbase, I don't believe for a second you'd have this problem.
Your problem is essentially self-inflicted by young people who don't participate with the idea that someone will one day their unlikely vote. They won't.
Right now young people can't be relied on for winning elections and so politicians don't rely on them.
They have more reliable people willing to help them win, and they are called voters. That is who they chase. The average voter. Young people need to move that average if they want more attention.
The median age of eligible voters is 48. So 50% of eligible voters are under 48. The oldest millennials today are 45. So actually no, millennials and younger could easily decide elections if they just voted at similar rates as older people do.
This is not recent. The US has a low birth rate, so the country is getting older, not younger. Young people have always made up a significant share of eligible voters, they just have never really voted.
If we stop voting things only become worse if we continue to vote and support.
Enlightened Candidates things will get better. It will be slow but it will work. What comedy decades it's taken the republicans to screw things up so badly. Fixing it will take time.
> In early 2001, the CBO projected under current-law baselines that the federal government would completely erase its debt held by the public by 2006, and that the U.S. government would accumulate a cumulative surplus of roughly $5.6 trillion through 2011.
This is just a fancy way of saying the stock market went up 38% in the last 3 years. I'm a 35 year old millennial with all my money in the S&P500 and I also got 38% richer.
Yea the boomer bashing is a bit much here on Reddit. Of course they have money, they have been saving for years. Compounding interest and the like. It's a marathon not a sprint. As you go through life your income should naturally go up. When it does the secret is to not increase your lifestyle, but increase your savings. Most people don't and option for the Bimmer instead of the 10 year old car. It's just how it works. It's not how much you make, it's how much you save.
It's not by accident. its not that they are smarter or just older. It's primarily because of the choices we have made in how strucgture wealth, who gets to keeep what, who gets public subsidiesand who doesnt.
"please look at your neighbor owning a house, but NEVER EVER look at the billionaires murdering millions as we speak ok? please accept this proaganda."
Put money into your retirement folks asap. You’d be amazed how a little every check can add up over several years. Dad invested into his retirement for 40 years and when I had to take over his finances due to serious medical issues (seriously bad stroke) I was fuckin flabbergasted because I saw the amount 9 years ago when he retired and what he has in there now is significantly more. Getting on top of that retirement is key even if that 100/mo fuckin hurts because he said it hurt like hell when I was little but he knew better.
You're asking people to do sensible investing on a website where the solution to every problem is "tax the rich!". I hope you reach someone, but I doubt it
Both ideas can be true. You can amass a nice sum of money over decades through investing and also tax billionaires who sit on concentrations of wealth and lobby to increase that wealth at the cost of our quality of life.
"I live paycheck to paycheck. I have $10 I can spend on beans and rice... orrrr I can invest it, and in 10 years, I'll have $20 to spend on beans and rice! I'll just eat air until my next paycheck!"
You're handing out advice that only works when people have savings to invest, then acting superior about it.
For 98 percent of young ppl - DoorDash Uber Eats less. I guarantee that every single one of you spends at like 40 bucks a month and some of you over a g a month on food delivery bullshit.
You can’t be angry and upset by facts. Sorry not sorry that it’s a fact that Gen Z turds who complain about money waste tons of it on food service delivery rather than meal prepping or brown bagging.
This is exactly why kids who make 40-50k a year who sometimes don’t even drive and who live at home no rent and parents still pay for their cell phone bill can’t get ahead. Very few are hustlers.
You are better than everyone else. I know how much you need to hear that. You're better, and smarter, and they're just stupid little dummies. Good job!
The boomers that can afford healthcare are still alive, the poor ones are dying and need the gen z workers to share their income so they can stay alive.
There are a lot of poor boomers. The issue is not generational war. The issue is class war. The landed boomers and landed GenZ work together against the Boomers getting by on social security and the GenZ making low wages.
This. My boomer dad is broke as shit. I’m doing much better and my kid likely will be as well, because we both had access to greater opportunity than he did.
But our paychecks go much less further because of the billionaires, and not just the idiot boomer billionaires. The idiot GenX and millennial billionaires too.
The money has already been blocked from the younger generations. It was concentrated with the boomers. Now, the hoarding class is going to bleed the boomers dry with healthcare costs and reverse mortgages.
What’s the thing about the boomers though… When you look at the boomers all around the United States of America what do you see… What you see is a bunch of people that don’t give a shit about the younger people and they continue to vote and that direction and they do not give one fuck about you even eating avocado toast
It would also help if we realized this is bot level bullshit to divide people. https://fortune.com/2026/09/22/gen-z-wealth-income-vs-boomers-millennials-richest-generation-great-expectations/
but guess what stops young people from voting the most? work, school commitments, family commitments. Easy solution will be making voting more flexible, more early voting sites, longer voting periods, mail-in ballots,
Guess who keeps voting for the party that tries to stop all those things. yup boomers. It's easy to find time to vote when you ar eretired.
Excerpts from article by Nick Lichtenberg, citing Federal Reserve release, BofA analysis, and WSJ post, with commentary by Nick Maggiulli and Samuel Moyn:
[...] The Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Consumer Finances revealed a striking split: Median net worth rose roughly 38% for households headed by someone 75 or older between 2022 and 2025, while falling 23% for those headed by someone under 35. Both figures account for inflation, according to an analysis by Nick Maggiulli, chief data officer at Ritholtz Wealth Management and author of The Wealth Ladder.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the age split in a short post on what it called “the gold standard for measuring household wealth,” which the central bank releases every three years. Americans 55 and over now hold roughly $140 trillion, about three-quarters of the nation’s net worth, Fortune reported this month, citing a Bank of America Institute analysis of the Fed data.
The oldest households finished the period with a median net worth of $504,600, up from $366,288 in 2022, measured in 2025 dollars. For the youngest households, it fell from $42,725 to $32,820. The oldest group now has roughly 15x the wealth of the youngest, compared with about 9x three years earlier.
Across all families, inflation-adjusted median net worth rose just 2% between 2022 and 2025, reaching $215,900. That modest national gain concealed sharply different experiences at opposite ends of the age spectrum.
The findings also echo an argument Yale law and history professor Samuel Moyn made in an interview with Fortune this summer about his book,Gerontocracy in America: The concentration of wealth among older Americansis not merely a matter of who has had longer to save. In his account, it also shapes whose interests the economy and political system serve.
Moyn describes an “oldigarchy,” in which older, disproportionately wealthy Americans hold outsize influence. His book argues that “aging Americans control the biggest bank accounts and stock portfolios,” and that “the old rich have pulled away from everyone else.”
Asked about the latest Fed figures, Moyn responded by email that they further prove his thesis. “The question is whether the age correlation of the haves versus have-nots with the older versus the younger is fair,” Moyn ventured. “And it isn’t. So this is a case of the older getting richer, not just the rich getting richer.”
“The boomers have created a new American system of rule, which reserves power—including in the form of wealth—for later life,” he told Fortune. “And that is the wrong time for power, including in assets and resources.”
The Yale professor added that he does not expect the pattern to end here. Boomers, he wrote, “lucked out in acquiring a lot early and enjoying several asset bubbles along the way,” but the issue is older asset owners in general. “The pattern will increasingly be wealth concentrated towards the upper end of the age spectrum.”
[...] When Fortune first talked to Maggiulli, in August 2025, about his book The Wealth Ladder, he said there’s “something weird” going on in the economy, a problem of too much affluence and numbers that do not always match how people feel.
“The economy wasn’t built to handle this many people with this much money,” he told Fortune. More recently, he described an “upper-middle-class trap,” in which even high earners find themselves working harder to buy declining-quality products and services.
His latest analysis gets at another version of that disconnect: Rising asset prices can make the economy look prosperous while leaving younger households behind. If you already have a house and a portfolio, your wealth can grow without much additional effort. If a large share of what you own is your car, the same economy can deliver a very different result.
The divide also fits a longer-running pattern. A 2025 paper submitted to the National Bureau of Economic Research by Edward Wolff found that average wealth among households under 35 fell from 21% of the national household average in 1983 to 16% in 2022. That measures relative wealth, not an outright decline in dollars, but it shows younger households falling further behind the country as a whole.
Even within wealthy families, Moyn told Fortune, the timing can work against younger generations. “We have this syndrome even within wealthy families of folks waiting around on their parents to inherit them,” he said. “It’s so late. It’s the wrong time in life for people to come into their house or their wealth.”
If your net worth is $500K, and $400K is house equity, you really don't have much money if you are not longer working. You can't eat your house, and you have to have a place to live.
I like how obviously bogus this article is and how many people in the comments are falling for it.
Real median net worth for <35 soared from $17.76k in 2019 to $42.72k in 2022. That's a 141% increase. Then it decreased to $32.82k or a 23% decrease. That's still 2nd highest of all time and 85% higher than in 2019.
The "wealthy boomer" is 75+ (but not the 65-74 category for some reason). Their net worth increased 13% from 2019 to 2022 (a lot less than 141%) and then increased 38% from 2022 to 2025. Combined that's a 56% increase over six years, or less than the 85% for <35.
But wait! The 65-74 group, who are also boomers, saw a 33% increase from 2019 to 2022 and a 4% decrease from 2022 to 2025 for a net increase of 28%. That's a lot less than 85%, too.
Anyone who took this article at face value got hoodwinked.
I can't speak for all boomers everywhere, but I do know that in my family, every one of us over 60 is supporting our millenial and Gen Z kids financially. Paying their university costs, buying them cars, either housing them directly or helping them buy a home.
My boomer parents, just like almost every boomer parent of my Gen X friends and relatives, gave me a deadline to leave home on my 18th birthday. No financial or moral support whatsoever, just the parting advice of "figure it out".
Now, they're elderly and having difficulty living independently on their own. In the decades since I left home, they amassed quite the real estate portfolio and an impressive amount in savings. I built a life on the other side of the country and now they want me to drop everything and relocate in order to help care for them.
My wealthy boomer parents loaned me $2,000 toward a down payment. Yes, I had to pay it all back. That is the only thing they have ever done for me financially. They have done nothing for my son who is a senior in college. They hoard their wealth like dragons.
This is embarrassingly bad economic journalism. Did anyone involved in writing or editing this take even an introductory statistics course?
The article breathlessly reports that younger Americans have been financially “wiped out” because median wealth declined 23% from 2022 to 2025. What it conveniently buries is that their wealth increased roughly 140% in the preceding three years. Do the elementary arithmetic and they’re still up approximately 85% in real terms since 2019.
Then it compares wealth among people under 35 with people over 75, apparently hoping readers won’t understand lifecycle wealth accumulation, compounding, or the problems with comparing changing age cohorts.
Worse, the article actually acknowledges some of these methodological problems and proceeds with the sensational narrative anyway.
This is Statistics 101 stuff. Cherry-pick the endpoints, ignore the relevant context, confuse correlation with explanation, and manufacture a generational economic catastrophe.
And journalists wonder why the public is losing confidence in their profession. This is precisely why.
Excellent points, though I think the cherry-picking etc. is exactly due to the journalists involved understanding, rather than misunderstanding, statistics.
Remember, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
A related nitpick regarding your final sentence:
> And journalists wonder why the public is losing confidence in their profession. This is precisely why.
A big part of the problem is readers increasingly favouring bad journalism over good journalism.
Clickbait and ragebait are everywhere, because, sadly, it works. People fall for it.
Don't blame the media when the people are happily complicit. Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur
Fair points. I agree readers are complicit, and I think there’s an important economic factor at work here.
The move from print to digital media fundamentally changed the business model. Publishers once relied largely on subscriptions and advertising tied to their readership. Now every click, share, and comment is measurable engagement with economic value. And the more engagement something generates, the more valuable it becomes.
Unfortunately, outrage and sensationalism are particularly effective at generating engagement. Publishers are responding quite rationally to an economic incentive that often rewards provocative content over sound analysis. Readers certainly play a role, but the incentives have changed dramatically.
I don’t have a great solution to that. There’s real value in engagement and the ability to measure it. I wouldn’t want to lose those benefits.
I also think we’re still relatively early in the Information Age. The technology and economics of information have changed much faster than our ability to navigate and critically evaluate what we consume.
I’m reasonably optimistic that we’ll get better at it over time. Consumers will become more discerning, publishers and platforms will adapt, and we’ll develop better habits for evaluating information and tempering some of the more reactionary behavior.
At least I hope so. We’ve had remarkably little time to adapt to a pretty fundamental change in how information works.
Your optimism is laudable, and somewhat inspiring.
Personally, as a transhumanist, I do think we'll eventually get there and overcome these challenges.
But in the current century, I can only see society as a whole growing more and more complex and chaotic,
and human cognition (and thus rationality) failing to keep up, even if augmented with computers.
It’s an unfortunate truth about our current reality. People don’t value proper journalism, they value attention/clicks. It’s more lucrative to write a bad piece with a sensation headline that report legitimate facts.
When my three kids graduated HS I gave them $$. I told them to be fruitful and multiply. Now they own properties, stocks; have good jobs and children. Distribute the wealth you Boomers.
My boomer father told me he had it way harder than me. This was after telling me his father bought a business for him for 300000$ (today’s value) and received 18000$ (today’s money) every quarter. He is now probably worth 15-20 million. I get 250$ on my birthday which basically paid for dinner for my wife and I that night.
Wow, my dad paid for my college in late 80s. But I also got partial scholarships so some of his money, I invested. Lost and learned, now that initial $35k is in &6m-$7m range.
Add more of course over my years of working.
*****
I have 4 children 25-32. Best thing we did was give them information on living costs, saving/investing, and it’s ok to live with roommates to be able to add to investments…
They are doing well. All 4 bought homes in last 2 years. Oldest son found out in March, wife due with twins and they had 9 month old. So moved from 3 bdrm to 5 bdrm house, sold old for $415k, got large place for $565k. Small amount to finance.
Youngest daughter 25, been working in her chemical engineering job for 4 years. Split $1100 2 bdrm and saved money. Bought new build 3/2/2 starter home in Austin. 1380 sqft, and put half down.
But we do get it. Not everyone is good with education or even worse don’t know to save or willing to save. Ugh…
My mom's parents gifted their daughters 3 houses each.
My mom has told me, "Oh, I would help you buy a house if I could".
Meanwhile my mom has subscriptions to 5 wineries, etc.
100%. Wealth was not distributed to GenX and Millenials because so many retirees are just doing the YOLO life. Absolutely zero thought of any kids they produced.
57, will be 58 later this year. Yeah, NW went up greatly. 97% of our Net Worth is stocks. Seen great increases, in most years. Up 67% since Jan 2020. Heck up 18% since Jan 2026. Great, I can pull more tax free principal from my trusts.
I also have 4 children 25-32. And their NW also went up. All 4 bought homes in last 2 years. All have no/little college bent, but each holds 2 baccalaureates. Used state grants, partial scholarships and work to pay tuition/books/dees for college. All have nice STEM careers. Yeah 6 digit starting wages. They max retirement and add to investments.
So NW went up went for them also. Their portfolio seeing increases, some good gains with oldest daughter 28% so far this year for increases. Steady growth with their 401k, IRA, Roth accounts. Emergency HYSA are seeing steady 6%.
Seems to be many are unable/unwilling to save/invest. Those that do are seeing good to great returns. My children, lived with roommates, max retirement, add to investments and saved to buy a home. Older 3 are married, so double 6 digit incomes.
My maternal grandfather did not offer me a cent for college (no idea if he did to my mom), but don't worry, he did spend 2x my total tuition for my entire degree on a boat he stepped on twice before selling at a massive loss.
Get ready. They are about to vote to increase younger people's payroll taxes too so their social security doesn't take a hit.
I actually don't disagree. Social security tax probably does need to go up for everyone, but I think it should be done gradually over 10-15 years so that the sucky part is spread more fairly between the younger people who will be paying more and the older people who grossly under-contributed to social security during their working years.
Is this a joke? A 12.4% payroll tax just for SS is insane and should not be increased
We need to remove the income cap on SS tax before we raise the rates a penny.
Federal tax + SS tax + medicare/medicaid + state + property is currently around 55% of my gross. That's scandanvian county tax rates but I sure as hell don't have free healthcare, public transit, free university, childcare, etc.
Just corporate subsidies, inflation, unaffordable healthcare, $37 trillion in debt from wars.
Exactly. And if you're self employed like me, you get to pay the full 15.3% tax on the entire earnings. Meanwhile I like in a neighborhood with super rich boomers who collect social security for their wine subscriptions. Remove the income cap and also offer an option to opt out of the system altogether. I don't want social security and I don't want to subsidize the lives of wealthy people.
Not joking. Removing the cap is one lever that could be pulled, but Americans don't pay enough for social security to keep is solvent. We need to pay more into it if we care to have the program. "Get someone else to pay for it" isnt a valid strategy.
Raising the cap will increase taxes on a huge portion of the middle class. Most wealthy people don’t make much in terms of actual income.
Jeff Bezos salary at Amazon is $81,000 per year. So he would be entirely unaffected.
You would be taking money from engineers, doctors, CRNAs, tech guys, even like police who do a lot of overtime and giving that money to retired boomers. This would be terrible for the economy
If they wanted to have thier social security stable, maybe they shouldn't have consistently voted for candidates that cut taxes and increase the debt. No let's just let them fuck over the future generations one last time as they roll into thier grave.
Yeah, I want social security to support our elders. But a large amount of our current elderly population who want to keep their social security also voted for the party that cut rich people's taxes, cut other important social programs like medicaid and food stamps, and generally tries to stomp out any policy that even feels a little bit like "socialism". While still raising the deficit anyway spending tons of money on f*cking bullshit like starting a new fcking war for no reason.
These people essentially believe "We want ours and for you to go f*ck yourself".
I still sympathize will all of our elders who are normal or good people, but the selfish and crazy ones who think they're owed everything while wanting everyone else to get f*cked get none from me.
The irony of boomers yearning for a time when the country invested much more into social programs, schools, universities, infrastructure, etc. while continuing to vote to cut all of those things being completely lost on them drives me absolutely crazy
Some of them I think are just genuine idiots who can't form any opinion without being to told to so without Fox News telling them to.
And then some of them I do think actually understand the complexities of it, or at least some of them, but don't care anyway and do very seriously believe in "getting theirs" and screwing over everyone else along the way.
I've known older people who will brag about how without even completing high school they were able to get a job that allowed them to buy a house, support a family, get healthcare, get a pension, and retire comfortably. They're fully aware of how well they had it, and how much harder it is for young people to get by today.
Yet they continue to support and vote for everything that allows for it to stay that way or allow it to continue to get worse. And they just don't care about the irony or hypocrisy. They want theirs, and f*ck anyone else. I have literally heard some of these people say that young people should go f*ck themselves and that they don't care about their problems, only their own. It really it is "I got mine, and screw everyone who comes after me".
Though realistically I think most of these types of people fall somewhere in between both being a moron, and being a selfish ladder-puller.
they should have a social security tax on stock dividends, capital gains, property taxes, and higher income. then the burden of social security taxes fails more on the wealthy especially asset owners and less on everyone else.
This makes the most sense to me. Cap gains have enjoyed extremely favorable tax treatment and investment growth is the primary driver of the growing wealth gap. It isn't because of some California software engineer who is paying 45% of their income in taxes already.
or some doctor who spent all his 20s and earl 30s in school and has 500k debt and is just finally starting a family.
Go tax grandpa sitting on 2 paid houses, going to Bahams to watch sports events, adding a new kitchen to his house so he can tempt his grandkids to come visit
Stock loans have interest applied and the principal amount of the loan is paid back. Why should they also be taxed? Is your home equity loan or any other loan that is paid back taxed?
Easy - regular folks arent using stock as collateral to obtain loans.
So yes, at a certain level they should be taxed as the ultra wealthy use it as a way to not pay taxes on sold stocks. Borrow, borrow and die is a loophole the ultra wealthy use.
The govt has to raise taxes somehow to pay for these shortfalls.
Assuming a gain, there is a tax at the sale of the shares. If the shares are not sold there is no tax.
Are you taxed on loans you take out? Imagine the impact to credit markets that if in addition to interest charged, the loan amount is also taxable to the borrower. What you are advocating for makes zero sense.
For the average person, the largest source of proceeds ever received are probably the gain from the sale of a primary residence and an inheritance of non retirement assets which get a step up in basis at death, neither of which are taxed to the seller/ recipient.
Again, why should a loan that is paid back with interest be also taxable to the borrower? The bank or brokerage includes interest received as earnings.
It wouldn’t destroy credit markets because wealthy people would still be saving vs paying taxes. Capital gains rates is far higher than a 6% surcharge for to bolster Social Security.
If they use stock as collateral for a large loan they are doing so to NOT sell stock and trigger taxes.
A lower to middle class person isn’t using millions of dollars worth of stock as collateral. Wealthy people do this to save more than 23% that the taxes would eat it.
The surcharge would only affect the uber wealthy.
The real question would be …. How much can actually be raised and would it be worth it? The govt has a unique skill of creating 1 dollar in tax but spending 20 dollars.
Nope - as most margin accounts are taxable. Also they aren’t using margin to skip out on taxes, as they will pay taxes. Now if someone wants to use margin in a Roth, then they already paid their taxes up front.
The ultra wealthy are using their millions and billions in stock to secure low interest loans, instead of selling the stock which triggers capital gains.
It won’t stop the uber wealthy from using the stock as collateral. It just lets them pay some taxes, instead of 0 taxes.
Use of a margin account is not taxable. There are some qualified dividend considerations but for the most part the margin strategy itself is not taxable.
If you believe that taxing the uber wealthy on transactions that are neither earnings nor capital gains to shore up social security then why not tax everyone on home equity loans? That is where the scale is.
Also why can’t it be means tested? I’ve never understood that. I get people will find a way around it (quit their jobs or whatever) but it’s even worse for someone to be making 6-7 figures in general/investment/dividend income AND getting max social security.
Fuck that! No means testing. Someone who invested in retirement should not be punished. No cap on the income taxed and a cap on the payout is the fairest way.
Terrible idea. The people who really make enough to be means tested out of social security are such a small part of the expense for the program, that it would be a drop in the bucket for saving costs and immediately make social security extremely unpopular by turning it into effectively a welfare program.
Did you respond to the wrong person? I said means testing would make the program very unpopular for effectively rounding error worth of savings. If you can't make the connection, that is a bad idea if we want the program to still exist. I don't really care if it is politically mean or not, it's just a dumb idea.
Why is that a dumb suggestion? You’re coming in hot but haven’t quite explained why - I think you think calling people dumb just wins the argument. It doesn’t.
It makes sense to me that it should be means tested - plenty of things are. It actually seems the opposite of politically unfeasible - people would quite obviously understand why we are doing that.
The idea that someone who is making 10 million dollars on investment income should also receive retirement income from an increasingly bankrupt government while other people get less doesn’t seem dumb to me. Saying Elon musk shouldn’t get social security seems logical.
I am calling the argument dumb, not you. I don't know you. "Rich" people pay far more into social security than they ever get out, which makes sense because the program is incredibly progressive. Practically that makes sense because the program couldn't exist without higher earners subsidizing the lower earners.
The reason the argument is dumb is because you have to consider both the potential benefits and potential costs. In this case the potential benefit is incredibly small. There just aren't that many people in the grand scheme of things who make that much money. The amount the social security program is spending on their benefits is effectively zero, so the savings are also effectively zero if you cut them out. Now what is the cost? The cost is that you take social security, which is currently highly popular, and risk making it significantly unpopular with a large segment of the population. You are fundamentally restructuring the program from an insurance program into a "wealth redistribution welfare" program. This is going to make it instantly unpopular with basically the Republican half of the country. Now we have lots of political willpower to neuter or kill the program.
That is a high cost for such a meaningless benefit.
I mean you’re calling something dumb without explaining why and still assuming that wins the day. Stop doing that and being a peak redditor ffs.
Practically there is no social program and you’re teetering on the verge of civil dissent and revolution if it’s shown that we’re unable to pay the poorer folks who also put into the system because we just have to give the Musks of the world their extra 100K per year in retirement and veer towards bankruptcy. Which we pay for with inflation which makes the smaller amount paid out to the average Joe 25 years from now unable to keep up with costs of living and the middle class person also unable to do so, but without any safety net.
It’s equally “dumb” to not understand that, correct? Even if we take your assertion at face value, that “this will do nothing since it’s a rounding error” (I’m not sure it is, but whatever), the idea that doing nothing to avoid “being considered a welfare program” pales in comparison to “future rioting in the streets because we simply couldn’t conceive of not paying billionaires social security, and didn’t understand the optics of that.”
Social security was designed as a pay-as-you-go-system. Current workers paying for current recipients. The "trust fund" exists because boomers contributions exceeded what was needed at the time.
"Between 1984 and 2009, Social Security ran significant cash surpluses (excluding interest). Such surpluses were primarily the result of program reforms enacted in 1983. Those reforms slowly raised the retirement age and increased payroll taxes, which produced substantial trust fund reserves during the 1990s and early 2000s."
I'm a younger boomer born in 1960, finished undergrad in 1983. The reforms increased what we paid during our careers and delayed our full retirement age by 2 years.
I have this theory that markets are concentrating wealth at the top, and conservative policy has restricted one of the main redistribution methods, progressive tax rates, so we have a problem that is unsustainable and will be marked by continuous inflation and increasing bankruptcy and poverty.
So, y'all experts need to tell me if I'm right or wrong abut my thinking.
That’s been going on since Reagan. It’s the main problem.
s to the article, it is worth pointing out that they don’t own more things, the things they already owned are worth more. They will also suffer the worst in a market crash as those things are devalued the most.
Yep this. Those of us with real world wealth also understand how investment compounds
Instead of saying boomers, it’s really just anyone that has a portfolio. My portfolio grew 50% in 18 months and I did nothing. This is simply a result of fiscal policy, tax policy, that favors capital over labor
You’re not wrong, but this misses the point for how the data should be analyzed.
The data from the article is accurate, too.
It is spotting out a problem where the youngest generation is not able to afford life to properly start a portfolio, while those who already own homes from cheaper times and has previous savings already is making large amounts of money from the stock market.
This is a real problem, too. Those heavy stock gains are coming from consumer spending, which includes the younger generation having to spend more and being unable to save.
One thing I would highlight as one small, but critical example, is the impacts of NIMBY-ism on local zoning and its impacts on building cheaper housing.
In the 70’s-90’s Boomers were a large cohort that had more political control, due to their large numbers by percentage of the population, and suburban growth of low-cost starter homes was common, easy to come by, and cheaper for developers.
Now that they have settled and moved on, they are often blocking development of what used to be called “starter homes,” except in more confined urban areas where land has more expensive property values and more costs to development.
This is one example for how one generation protected their own interest that varied with their age, but they aren’t helping much with the needs of the new generation.
But the problem is you’re not taking data from multiple sources and realizing they’re both true.
You need to analyze why the aggregate data is showing why one group is going up and one group is going down. That’s very telling.
It doesn’t show that there aren’t rich millennials/Genz (although I think the article was primarily about younger millennials and genz) and there aren’t poor boomers, but it does show the differences are so large that one generation is losing wealth, while one gains.
You can’t ignore aggregate data from a group, because there is a distribution range.
Do that and you’ll always be able to use relatively few individuals as an excuse to ignore real macroeconomic data.
What are you talking about? By aggregating data you are the one cherry picking it
I’m saying people with stocks grew disproportionately, disregarding boomer or not. I’m not saying boomer didn’t gain more. Because by definition people who are closer to retirement are going to have more assets
In fact when you lump the dirt broke poor boomers with rich boomers and lump the wealthy millennials with the middle class you are incorrectly labeling them.
Choosing to look atacroeconomic data that says one group got richer and one group got less money over a fixed period of time is not cherry-picking data.
Choosing to only look at those rich from the poorer group and inly looking at those poorer from the richer group is cherry-picking data!
Not like it was in the post-WW2/pre-Reaganomics days.
The zeitgeist of American government used to be those that garnered windfall profits the most from government action (defense contractors, government contractors, subsidized industries) paid a healthy chunk back in the form of taxes on profits.
Now conservatives have sold a pack of lies to the public regarding taxation and redistribution so more wealth is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.
Boomers, immigrants, the old, the young, it doesn't matter. Buy the media, bribe the legislators, get the people enraged with each other and then leave via the back door with the serious money.
No. Liquidating billionaires doesn’t create new housing supply, doesn’t affect the cost of goods and services. The marginal dollar of a billionaire goes to investment, not consumption. Reducing subsidies to wealthy boomers on the other hand could reduce the cost of healthcare, shelter and other labor intensive services. Take a look at the percentage of federal and state budgets that go to Medicare and social security and ask yourself if we should be foisting tens of trillions of dollar of debt on future generations to subsidize the retirement of the wealthiest generation in history.
No. My landlord owns 40 houses, he’s no older than 45. The problem is wealth inequality as is, the age gap is just more working class division. Poor boomers and poor gen A are in the same boat and it’s sinking, so we really need to point the dingy at the yacht and get to the real work.
Your landlord isn’t the problem. He made a rational decision to invest in a scarce resource. Marginalize the NIMBYs, build housing, and the problem is solved.
Disagree. More housing won’t help if it’s gobbled up by folks with capital. Currently more vacant homes than homeless as is. Further, he did not. He inherited most of his homes, as per his cousin who he contracts to come work on my house. I met him one time, and that was at lease signing 2 years ago. He doesn’t invest or do any labor on the home, simply collects a check and outsources the labor. 🤷♂️
The problem isn't a boomer who owns two houses. People owned a vacation home when I was a kid and it wasn't an issue.
The problem is billionaires buying up entire city blocks. Liquidating billionaires and their businesses totally would create a massive new housing supply. People are already talking about "Renting your apartment from Walmart" because companies and billionaires already own a huge portion of the real estate market.
The top 1% own 13.4% of all residential property.
> The marginal dollar of a billionaire goes to investment, not consumption.
And property is a massive investment. You seem to think of investment as purely stocks and bonds, but people invest in all sorts of things, and land is one of the oldest forms of investment. The thing about land (as opposed to stocks and bonds) is that it stays valuable even when the stock market sucks because they're not making any more land. In fact with global warming it's fair to say that there's less every year.
I could go on, but the bottom line is that when billionaire-run media tells you boomers are the problem that's standard misdirection and you're a moron if you fall for it.
The problem is billionaires. They shouldn't exist. You'll never be one. An economy with a 1,000 millionaires is better off than an economy with 1 billionaire. A economy with a million millionaires is a hell of a let better off than an economy with 1 trillionaire.
If you can't grasp this you should be on a subreddit like r/economics.
Billionares getting richer off of assets that are inflated by the money printer that's needed to deflate the debt that's taken to fund huge welfare bills. 😲
>“Their wealth gains came from appreciating assets. There’snothingwrong with that. But many younger households may not get the opportunity to build wealth in this way.”
Good to know the cause of the divide is acceptable to the elite. Wasn't this a problem that is metastasizing? End credit creation, i.e. loans, for the purpose of acquiring homes other than the first one and dole out seed capital to every youth coming of age financed with taxes on financial assets.
If someone had a mortgage on their (first) home, paid it off, and kept living in that house, after the housing prices have risen, they would still gain wealth, at least on paper. In their daily life, they just keep living in their house and won't benefit more from the higher value.
The higher value of their home will not become relevant until it will be sold. If they live there when they die, they will never see a penny, only the benificiaries will.
Notice that I mentioned credit creation; the reason is that when banks grant mortgage loans, in spite of the theory written in economics textbooks, they create money. When an ever-increasing amount of money chases goods in limited supply, you get inflation, more specifically asset price inflation in this case.
Of course, that is not the only cause, however, it is one among the most important. To be more accurate, the good in limited supply in question is not houses themselves, but urban land. In this light, another chief cause is competition between aspirant urban dwellers in securing a place to live in the city.
To be clear, instead of regarding asset price inflation as a given I'm drawing attention to its causes.
The day it becomes relevant is when massive amounts of young people will never be able to even afford a house to die in
Wealthy people live uninterrupted on an even keel due to their wealth, it's the kids that are going to have to either accept less or claw their way to any sort of workable payrate.
My own grandmother complains about the rate of development, as if its absence wouldn't render her progeny perpetual basement dwellers. My home owning coworkers used to say that they didn't want the land around them to be turned into density housing because they didn't want to "live next to transients" (Honestly, understandable but still cold)
No, lmao. Trace the votes, and it's the homeowners. Real estate investors wish that had that clout. They simply sweep in after to take advantage of the scarcity and/or local corruption. [You can kill land speculation in its crib with an LVT, but that's a different topic.]
Zoning codes are set by local entities. Local politicians are voted in by local voters. Most local elections have terrible turnouts - and the majority of voters who do vote in local elections are homeowners. (> 60%). These homeowners vote in their self interest and force the city to keep creating onerous zoning codes. In their minds, less building = higher property values.
Bigger cities are more dynamic - Midwest cities and Austin having good results by promoting construction. Though most cities are captured by some sort of anti-building coalition.
Total bullshit. Gen Z is the best off of any generation in US history. https://fortune.com/2026/09/22/gen-z-wealth-income-vs-boomers-millennials-richest-generation-great-expectations/
I think this argument confuses having a higher income with actually being better off economically. Gen Z might earn more in inflation-adjusted terms than previous generations did at the same age, but that doesn't automatically mean they have greater financial security or the same opportunities to build wealth.
The biggest example is housing. Home prices have risen significantly faster than incomes over the past several decades. Even if you're earning more than your parents did at your age, that doesn't mean much when buying a home requires a substantially larger share of your income. And housing isn't just another consumer expense. For previous generations, homeownership was one of the primary ways ordinary Americans accumulated wealth.
There's also a difference between average wealth and the financial circumstances of the typical person. A generation can appear wealthier on paper because of gains concentrated among higher-income households, while people without significant assets struggle to get ahead. That's especially important when comparing younger generations with older ones who benefited from decades of rising property values.
I also think it's misleading to use general inflation-adjusted income as the definitive measure of economic well-being. Inflation doesn't affect every expense equally. Housing, healthcare, and higher education can become less affordable relative to income even while purchasing power improves in other areas. Being able to afford a better television or smartphone doesn't necessarily compensate for having a harder time affording a house.
None of this means Gen Z is worse off in every respect. There have been genuine improvements in living standards, wages, tech, etc. But saying they're the "most well-off generation in US history" based primarily on income and aggregate wealth ignores some pretty significant structural disadvantages.
Housing is not as great of wealth generator as stocks and bonds. A typical allocation for a 401k or pension would net more wealth overall if extra housing dollars were put into a fund for generating wealth. Plus, homes now are way better to live in than the ones boomers had so even a smaller home is a better home.
Depends when you bought in. Most regular investors won't have bought in at the floor, they will have bought in when stocks were already overvalued, so when it crashes they are eating the loss to their networth.
Sure they can sell, but they may have just seen 10-20 years of hard work flushed down the crapper.
I mean, to feel properly well off you probably do need a salary in the few hundred thousand dollars range - especially if you’re raising a family in an expensive area.
Doesn’t mean everyone gets to have that, of course.
It’s more of a thing that boomers got cheap homes and cheap interest rates, Gen X got cheap homes with high interest rate, millennials got expensive homes with low interest rates, but Gen Z has both high prices and high rates
Exactly. The problem is that QOL naturally has to plateau, but everyone thinks their life and comfort should be twice that of the previous generations.
Good catch. Both articles are written by the same author! "Gen Z is actually richer than any generation before them — but they have the curse of Great Expectations" and then three weeks later, "The wealthy boomer problem is metastasizing—they got 38% richer over the last 3 years as Gen Z and millennials under 35 got wiped out"
Buddy, inflation was way higher in the 70s into the 80s. And have you taken even one single moment to observe the long period where mortgage rates were 8, 10, and as much as 15% over the 70s-90s. Stop thinking current generations have some sort of monopoly on financial challenges. They are perhaps different, but they aren’t mor or less.
You just walked right past the point. The dollar was losing purchasing power at a substantially faster rate during the 1970s and early 1980s than it has in recent years. Inflation exceeded 10% annually in multiple years, and mortgage rates eventually topped 18%.
Of course a dollar bought more in 1980. Nominal wages were also dramatically lower. That’s why economists adjust for inflation and compare real incomes, prices, and financing costs.
Every generation has faced different economic conditions and affordability challenges. You can’t establish that today’s are uniquely worse by ignoring the economic conditions previous generations actually experienced.
But I’m giving you huge thumbs up for the orange cat profile avatar!
Except the actual day-to-day cost of real things has blown way past actual literal technical inflation.
Just a quick google turned up that the average car in 1975 was $4,750.00, that’s less than $28k in 2026$, but the average cost of a car in 2026 is ~50k.
Sure that’s pretty cursory halfassed internet research, but can’t imagine the real numbers are so different as to negate my point.
That argument requires considerably more rigor. You’re comparing average transaction prices 50 years apart without accounting for changes in vehicle size, quality, equipment, safety, performance, or the mix of vehicles consumers choose to buy. You also need to account for real income growth and the cost of comparable transportation.
Actual economic research paints a much more complicated picture. Some things have become more affordable, others less. Different generations have faced different economic challenges, and the evidence doesn’t support a sweeping conclusion that any one generation has had it categorically worse across the board.
I’m perfectly willing to examine those differences, but two prices pulled from Google establish very little and certainly don’t disprove anything I’ve said.
Other countries sell cars for as little as $10k, so I’m not sure the reason cars cost 50k here comes down to unavoidable developments in automotive technology. Again yes I’m sure there’s a zillion great reasons we have to pay way more for the same shit, but those reasons don’t really ring true for people whose paychecks aren’t seeing the same increases as daily necessities.
And I’d assume car costs are probably a decent bellwether for prices, but if so much else has gotten cheaper wanna enlighten me? TVs yea that’s one, black market weed here in NYC another, outside of that I’m at a loss.
You’re still making broad economic conclusions from selective examples without doing the analysis.
Cars selling for $10k in other countries tells us very little without comparing specifications, regulations, taxes, market conditions, and purchasing power. And the $50k average transaction price in the US doesn’t mean that’s what basic transportation costs.
As for what’s become cheaper, consumer electronics, computing, telecommunications, clothing, and many household goods are obvious examples, particularly when accounting for quality improvements. Housing, healthcare, and education present different challenges.
But this is precisely my original point. The evidence is mixed, and affordability varies enormously by category, income, and period. Economists have spent decades studying these questions. We don’t need to substitute anecdotes and assumptions for that research.
And none of your examples contradict anything I’ve actually argued.
Ignore that person. They acknowledge that, compared to the Volcker Shock, this time it's different and now some things are more affordable (stuff for rich people), while other things are more expensive (shit you need to survive).
You’ve managed to misrepresent both my argument and the Volcker shock. That period followed years of severe inflation, with the federal funds rate briefly exceeding 20%, mortgage rates approaching 19%, and the economy suffering a severe recession. Those were enormous economic challenges for ordinary households.
I’ve repeatedly acknowledged today’s affordability problems. But your claim that only luxuries have become cheaper while necessities have become more expensive is a sweeping generalization unsupported by any serious analysis.
If you have evidence, present it. Telling people to ignore arguments you haven’t bothered to understand adds nothing to the discussion.
All of this generational bickering is tiresome and, worse, doesn’t do anything for developing real solutions.
me: this time it's different and now some things are more affordable (stuff for rich people), while other things are more expensive (shit you need to survive).
you: As for what’s become cheaper, consumer electronics, computing, telecommunications, clothing, and many household goods are obvious examples, particularly when accounting for quality improvements. Housing, healthcare, and education present different challenges.
No, we don’t. You’ve invented a class distinction I never made and haven’t established. Clothing, electronics, telecommunications, and household goods are hardly exclusive to wealthy people.
The CBO’s January 2026 study of household income from 1979 to 2022 found that inflation-adjusted income increased across every income quintile, even before accounting for taxes and transfers. The gains were unequal, certainly, but economic progress was hardly confined to the wealthy.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62300
You seem determined to conclude that younger generations have been systematically disadvantaged by older generations enjoying some sort of free ride. That’s an enormous claim, and the CBO study alone doesn’t settle the generational question either way.
Your argument relies on cherry-picking, sweeping generalizations, and assuming the conclusion you’re supposed to demonstrate. If you have serious evidence for that broader claim, present it.
The last brand new car I bought 2 years ago was less than 25k. Hydrid Toyota Corolla. It also has way more features and is much more reliable than what could be bought in 1975.
Carolla like Adam? I'd assume if you owned a car you could spell it.
But snarky pointing out of likely typos aside, yea $50k isn't the get-in price for any car, it's an average. But fair enough does look like the entry-level price has stayed pretty close, I suppose some Keeping Up With The Jonses could factor into the discrepancy in average price.
Food is generally cheaper actually. Cars are also cheaper if you buy an economical car like a corolla, they get better mileage and last longer than they used to so the lifetime cost is generally lower.
First, while it is true that the average wealth of a gen z is greater than the boomers at the same age, the median wealth of gen z is 20% less than that of boomers [1]. This shows a widening wealth inequality that the average simply cannot display.
Secondly, according to the federal reserve while in 1989 households under 40 held about 12% of wealth while today it’s about 6.6% [2] showing that as the US economy grew wealth disproportionately flowed to the top.
I am convinced that there are more bots and government paid propaganda campaign commenters on Reddit than actual people.
The Boomer Hate is a propaganda campaign designed to get younger folks ok with the idea of hurting the elderly.
Social Security will be cut and death panels/euthanasia will be administratively implemented. Aunt Sara, who has a nice house that was bought 40 years ago, goes on a few vacations a year, will be harmed.
Yet - the ‘Boomers’ with the true wealth won’t feel a thing. You think they rely on laughably small SS checks?
I hope you low IQ commenters and government workers/contractors realize that caring for parents will fall on your shoulders if deep cuts are made.
That being said, I’m against things like lowering property taxes for the elderly. It creates distortions in housing and the highest and best use of land.
If I loose my job and can’t afford my home - I must move. If an elderly person sits on real estate that has increases in value to such an extent that cannot pay the taxes on it - they must move.
What are you smoking? Fucking crazy talk.
Death Panels and Euthanasia? What kind of crazy victimization drugs are you taking?
People arent pissed off about the elderly that have saved and paid off their homes. They are pissed off that the boomers have constantly and systematically removed the components of our society that let them get to that point in the first place.
Boomers have consistently voted to pull up the ladders they climbed on.
I feel like it's part of the elite making sure the last of our social safety nets get defunded and cut. Just make a few posts on Reddit to busy subreddits daily claiming it's Boomers who benefit from them and all these fake progressives will run around screaming about how they don't want to pay for it.
These are the same people who claim to want single payer healthcare. Right. I already know they wouldn't want to pay for healthcare of those who are elderly, unemployed, etc.
>I hope you low IQ commenters and government workers/contractors realize that caring for parents will fall on your shoulders if deep cuts are made.
This is already a very much a thing. Except that nowadays workers also have to provide for and compete with not just with their retired parents over goods and services shrinking number of workers create but also for increasingly more childless people on top of their parents.
I'm not about to claim I know what bots do, or even what they're trying to do. They're definitely there, and they're definitely doing things, that's all I know for sure.
The other thing I know for sure is when people in my family born betweeb 1950 and 1965 bitch about losing money in the stock market and ask, "How am I supposed to afford the clean up for the wind damage to the large trees in my yard?" ...we'll you see, maybe if you sold one of your 4+ cars, one of your 2+ houses, or stopped taking one of your yearly trips to Europe or your twice yearly cruises, maybe it would all be fine. The shit they pull is in front of my eyes, not on a screen.
Russian bots are absolutely not causing the massive overconsumption of (generally) the boomer generation. Russian bots may be riling the resentment later generations are feeling, but I think it's a lot to point to them as one of the causes of said resentment.
There was a study done where people were given more money at the start of a monopoly game than everyone else. After they won (due to having more money) they were asked why they won and most of them said it was the way they played the game, not the massive headstart. The same thing with the boomers, they won the lotto just by being born when they were. But if you ask them they think it was all due to hard work. My grandfather who didn't graduate highschool had multiple cars, a boat, houses, RV, a plane at one point. He wasn't alone either there were a few guys at the same mill who had planes and many many men of that era were members of yacht clubs etc. Hardly anyone I know has that kind of wealth and definitely not as a non-highschool graduate mill worker.
Yup. Wait until they cut benefits because of the boomer hate and then start enforcing filial responsibilities laws. A lot of people probably don't even know these exist in most states.
ah yes, the problems in the economy and the world are the fault of boomers…
the real problem? it’s billionaires and millionaires and corporate greed. they’ve been buying up all of the single family homes for decades and rent them for 3x what they used to get, or flip them and sell for 1,000% more, or worse, turn them all into airbnbs for a never ending stream of revenue. they don’t pay tax like the rest of us do bec they get loans on what they could be worth, or have the money to “buy low and sell high” while the rest of us are struggling just to buy things like, you know, food.
they buy up entire media organizations and dictate the stories we are fed bec in reality, their goal is to divide the rest of us until we are so distracted and at each others throats, we don’t blame he real problem - them.
not only do they not pay their fair share when it comes to taxes, they don’t pay a living wage so the very people that made them rich can’t afford to buy a home or you know, eat.
meanwhile grandma and grandpa had to sell that home they worked their fingers to the bone for 50 years and struggled to pay off so they can pay for assisted living and healthcare, hoping it’s enough to survive until they die.
just a reminder that millionaires and billionaires reach the cap on social security on january 1st, while the rest of us poors pay our 12% all year long. politicians have been telling us for decades how it will go bust in 20 years, and then strike down the thought of taxing the rich or removing the cap to pay for it.
That’s how age works, and why millennials are also far better off than they were ten years ago. Check out any chart on age vs. wealth and you’ll see they’re kinda synonymous.
You’d also probably be shocked to find the wealth disparity between Alpha vs. Z too. It’s absolutely criminal how much Z makes in comparison.
It only makes sense that the longer you work and accumulate assets like houses and other property the more money you’ll have. This is just another hit job on older people. So tired of the whiners who want everything handed to them because they don’t like the idea of actually working for something.
In Canada we had a PM who said over and over and over that he was going to somehow lower house prices (we have a crisis in Canada) without hurting boomer retirement savings in their houses.
We have a scrappy little socialist party where a perennial looser of a leader said the same thing. That housing prices were hurting young people and that something needed to be done, as long as it didn't hurt long term home owners (boomers).
We have a third party which is pretty much entirely boomers, and they would never harm their boomer core constituents in a million years (unless it was to help boomer oligarchs).
Keep in mind that the top 10% of Boomer households hold roughly 67% to 71% of the generation's total net worth. So looking at total increase in wealth is meaningless because it may mean it only affects the super rich. I couldn't read the whole article because of paywall.
I am a boomer and most certainly did not get 38% richer but maybe more boomers are entering the pool now and that increases the wealth factor. Boomers who are older and have to take RMD and live on it may make a little money but not a lot. I would suggest using median as opposed to average wealth because billionaires are older as well.
The AI bubble popping will fix that. Just don't sit on your dicks and start buying low. Stop eating out, cancel all dumb subscriptions and tv, do whatever it takes to invest when it all craters and the boomers are destroyed.
There is a graph that is posted periodically on Reddit and in these conversations, that shows essentially wealth by age by generation. I am having trouble finding a copy of it. But it usually makes the opposite argument - that young people are actually ahead of older people (usually with some kind of poke at Gen X at being particularly bad at this, although our wealth and population shares match right now).
Both kinds of data seem to be highlighted to stoke inter-generational conflict, which seems to be a priority of this article also.
But I guess (a) obviously certain forces, most of the time, cause the rich to become richer and the poor poorer - and there are more rich among older people, and (b) the analysis of the article seems to involve some cherry picking of the dates.
But which is it - are young people way ahead of prior generations for their age or way behind? It doesn’t seem like they can both be true.
I'm under 33 and I'm doing just fine. All my bills are paid. I have savings on top of a 401k.
I never stopped working during the pandemic and my job gives me 6 weeks of vacation a year.
I work for a grocery store. Will I ever become a millionaire? No probably not. But I don't need to be one. I'm getting by just fine. I have co-workers in similar situations to me and close in age as well.
My store is ALWAYS hiring because people are lazy as shit and end up quitting because they actually have to work and not just sit on their phones all shift and collect a check.
>Boomers help explain why the oldest group’s gains look so large. Wealthier boomers aged into the 75-and-older bracket between surveys, lifting its median.
It's important to note why this happens, which isn't necessarily people already in the "75+" bracket getting richer, but boomers entering that bracket with their existing wealth.
There are always problems with the oldest generations having the most wealth, because wealth accumulates and exponentiates over time.
There's definitely a growth in wealth of median individuals too, that is mentioned in the article, but it's half that size, and that's way more to do with the crazy stock market in the last decade with the AI bubble.
So class warfare is now insufficient, it has to be class and age group warfare. Boomers are the problem everyone- nothing to see here with the 0.1 percent billionaires in the next age group down. Don’t worry about the boomers- the medical and long term care industries will suck up that money like nothing.
Yet another lying pointless attack on the people of an entire generation that conflates the stress of younger people with rapacious greed on the part of older people that DOES NOT EXIST!
The largest contributor to wealth is when earnings from hard work are invested early and the time value of money takes over and multiplies that. So, obviously your net worth is going to be higher at 65 or 70 than at 25 or 30.
This is how money F'ing works, and all the jealousy in the world is not going to change it, but these posts have one common thread, hatred for older people and demands that we be stripped of assets at a time in life when people are settling their affairs to hand over to younger people who will survive us.
Well I will burn my assets before leaving them to people who think they are ENTITLED to everything I worked for.
Reddit is a sewer but no other type of hate posts are tolerated quite as openly as the hate for older people. Good luck because something tells me you are never going to make it to an age where you have to decide how to allocate your assets as your life comes to a close. Because taking other people's hard earned and sacrificed for assets is even less sustainable than actually working for a wage and fighting for a fair wage.
The patrimony and net worth of millenials and genZ is going to be nowhere near close the actual one of boomers at the same age (of course, taking inflation into account).
Housing will not be a good investment in 20-30 years, once boomers start dying, because too much of the population of 1st world countries is there, with them, especially in Europe. And housing is one of the biggest problems in the current state of the 1st world, because it drains young people (that dont have help from their rich parents).
But hey, you live the life that it is time for you to live, boomers have had by far and wide the easiest time on this earth than any human has ever in humanity's history had across multiple countries and cultures, and they have left a broken world where climate change, job market and cost of living they have created is going to be suffered by others and not them.
It is really no ones fault, humans are short-sighted even when they believe the aren't.
I am happy I am neither millenial nor genZ, but I am sad how awful and entitled generations above me are when you have had the easiest fucking lives.
What you call "work all my life" is a joke, your generation has no idea what actually working is, how you can NOT learn on the job anymore as we used to do, you must know the job above and beyond to even start working on the most simplest of things
But I am losing my time, how can I expect someone so entitled to not be blind, stupid of me
It's funny how articles or posts like this seem to get very limited reception, but I keep seeing all of these nonsensical propaganda posts (usually based on bad data or deliberate data massaging) on how 'Gen Z is the richest generation ever' because of certain wealth estimations by age cohort.
Of course, they never actually index the wealth valuation to costs of actual essential goods like housing.
It's funny how they NEVER want to talk about relative wealth share by generation overtime and how the boomers as a generation had a higher wealth share at averaged age of 30 than Gen X did only up until about five years ago where Gen X finally surpassed their wealth share (the average Gen Xer was at the tail end of their 40s then for reference—so almost two whole decades behind).
Median age of first time home buyer is 40 now, when it was 28 in the 80s. Rates are high because of inflation, but home prices aren't coming down much because boomers are buying second homes in cash. Shit is cooked asf.
You're just agreeing with me, the problem is that high rates isn't driving the cost of houses down. Income tax was very high from the 40s through the 70s, meaning older generations collectively didn't have much spare cash to buy second homes with in the 80s. Mortgage rates (and just about every interest rate) is tied to the fed rate, which has been rising to deal with inflation. In normal conditions, higher mortgage rates would drive home prices down, but that's not happening because we've had decades of very low income taxes and a stock market that's done very well aka rich boomers buying homes with cash since they don't have to borrow money and therefore aren't subject to high mortgage rates.
This has artificially propped up the price of houses and driven up the median age of first time homebuyers since unlike boomers they have to finance their homes.
You mean the people that have had the longest amount of time in their careers, bought homes 30-40 years ago that have appreciated over time, saved up for retirement and let it compound in the market and have been collecting social security have more wealth than those just starting or are only midway through their careers? In other news, the sky is blue and basic math is still mathing.
As others have stated, this is all generational and class warfare propaganda to get you distracted from the oligarchs and ruling class. Don’t buy it.
It isn’t as big a problem as it seems. I’ve been attending funerals for them at a record pace. There will be much to inherit. Too bad they won’t know how to manage it. 🤷♂️
Phrasing is a bit ambiguous, have boomers as a whole gotten 380% richer or have the wealthy boomers done so? I know plenty of boomers who are financially comfortable from a lifetime of work and investments but they sure haven't almost quadrupled their wealth in 3 years. Think conflating the boomer upper crust with all boomers is disingenuous.
50% of retirees rely on social security for at least 50% of their income. Yes, some have expensive homes because they bought them decades ago, but they can’t afford to move either because homes are expensive.
Wtf is this "Millienials got wiped out" bs?
My wife and I have increased our income by nearly 100k over the last three years. We are absolutely killing it. I'll be vastly more wealthy than 90% of boomers life savings by the time I'm 50.
We are not all broke retail workers. Millions and millions of us are well compensated wormong professionals. We basically all went college and everyone keeps telling us we're the smartest generation in human history, you'd think we'd get a little credit in navigating these catastrophies we keeping having. Getting pretty good at them by this point.
coriolisFX | 19 hours ago
Boomer wealth is unobjectionable, it's the result of decades of booming equity and property markets.
What's objectionable is spending 60% of the Federal budget on these people and giving them extra tax breaks at the state/local level too.
Legitimate_Page659 | 16 hours ago
Yeah, and property markets can’t boom the way they did any more. Rents eat up more of the income of tenants than ever before. Can’t squeeze blood out of a stone.
Property values may continue to go up to the point where only institutional investors can afford them, but rents can’t get infinitely high and they’re already approaching what markets will bear.
noveler7 | 8 hours ago
The crazy part is all of these covert ads I see on social media now about eliminating property taxes for retirees. They're the wealthiest segment of the population and they've had the easiest road with cheaper college and housing and full SS, and now they want another break.
BasicDesignAdvice | 8 hours ago
They vote. People under thirty don’t.
biscuitarse | 6 hours ago
And when they do, the men at least, vote Trump.
Whaddduptho | 4 hours ago
Only when they run women against him. Maybe don't do that?
theriskybusinesscar | 3 hours ago
JFC
Whaddduptho | 3 hours ago
Just being realistic. When they ran a man against Trump he won. In both cases where they ran a woman she lost. That's their failure. Maybe do what the voters want, ya know?
theriskybusinesscar | 3 hours ago
You're drawing sweeping conclusions from limited data and acting like it has any basis in reality.
How's this Biden underperformed downballot races in 2020 and Harris overperformed incumbent administrations around the world in 2024. Maybe we just shouldn't run anyone associated with the Obama Administration or over 65? At least those arguments have additional data supporting them.
Whaddduptho | 3 hours ago
Biden brought out 10 million "new" voters and none of them were around for Hillary or Kamala. And he was Obamas VP......
Even Jasmine Crockett recognizes who the democrat party needs to run.
Kamala wasn't over 65.
I don't pay attention to polls I pay attention to who actually wins.
gn63 | 5 hours ago
It is crazy to key these things to age. The argument is that many elderly are less prosperous and can lose their homes to property taxes, etc. Fine. But that is no reason to give a gift to everyone elderly without regard to their wealth. The $6000 per person tax income tax deduction given to those over 65 by the republicans in their latest tax law is absurd.
No-Category6398 | 3 hours ago
Reddit discovers means testing.
Legitimate_Page659 | 4 hours ago
Yes, and I see ads about how we need to increase social security benefits. Never mind that the program is headed toward insolvency. The boomers, who had access to affordable housing, education, and a remarkably strong labor market, now want even more money in social security, despite knowing that the program is already bankrupting the country.
It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.
a_library_socialist | 12 hours ago
And who owns the institutional investors?
FearlessPark4588 | 8 hours ago
pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, family offices
kilopeter | 11 hours ago
Aren't rents by design always adjusting to "what the markets will bear"? Are vacancy rates and unhoused % a proxy for the difference between current rents and what the market will bear?
Legitimate_Page659 | 4 hours ago
They are, but historically markets were softer than they are now. Covid unleashed a historic wave of greed in this country and every owner decided to see just how much they could raise prices. It turned out that the middle class was saving some money every month, so there was still value to extract.
That’s not true anymore.
WeirdKittens | 10 hours ago
They are but there is a relatively recent irrational expectation that they have to fully cover the mortgage costs of the property, which at least where I'm from didn't use to be the case until after covid. STRs have made this expectation even worse but that will fix itself when eventually we get a global recession where traveling will be the first discretionary expense cut.
snark42 | 2 hours ago
I feel like I'm missing something.
How is it irrational for landlords to expect to not lose money when considering mortgage, property taxes, maintenance costs and time spent on property?
0tanod | 10 hours ago
Oh the best part of this is for the first time new homes are now cheaper than old ones. The builders are going to have to hit their record profits If they want to offload their assets before their competitors.
mistressbitcoin | 7 hours ago
Hey now! Don't underestimate the ability of my tenants to find ways to sacrifice to build my wealth.
a_library_socialist | 12 hours ago
> it's the result of decades of booming equity and property markets.
That is objectionable. That doesn't happen in a vacuum. It means that later buyers are paying a higher price.
And yes, Boomers have always voted to reduce their taxes at whatever point they happened to be in. Income taxes in the 80s (as Boomers started making real money). Capital gains and housing as they bought property and equity in the 90s. Inheritance as their parents died in the 2000s.
TheDwarvenGuy | 18 hours ago
It's objectionable. Older people are responsible much of the time for blocking new housing, keeping the prices of new homes skyrocketing
BroughtBagLunchSmart | 8 hours ago
I mean they voted for fucking Reagan, they are responsible for this mess.
naijaboiler | 5 hours ago
then followed it up with GWB and Trump!
haloimplant | 3 hours ago
Reagan didn't manufacture millions of NIMBY boomers they came about naturally Canada has them too
coriolisFX | 17 hours ago
You make a great point.
siliconandsteel | 9 hours ago
These are not the same boomers.
You would need to introduce some, gasp, redistribution mechanic.
TikiTDO | 7 hours ago
> it's the result of decades of booming equity and property markets.
Which... The boomers created for themselves at the expense of future generations. It's not like the boomers had that early lesson about political power and then they just proceeded to not do anything with it. They've been influencing the direction of the US for over half a century now.
The generation spent decades ensuring they got everything, while everyone not them got the scraps. Well, they're old now, and they want to look around and see the next generation to receive the torch. But there isn't one. Most "intelligent" people are pursuing a tiny number of opportunities in markets with a lot of money, while almost every other domain people need to actually run society has less and less people practising it by the day.
It's like, yes. If you as a generation decide to burn the full capacity and good will of an empire in one generation to make just that generation richer, the the next generation will not have that capacity and good will. Then when those same boomers look at the world and go "This isn't the world I grew up in..." Fuckin obviously not. When you actively spend your life destroying your own world, you're likely to be successful.
Check_Me_Out-Boss | 4 hours ago
They don't get 60%.
That's just how much we spend on entitlements overall.
SignalOptions | 2 hours ago
Well all the politicians are boomers, so …
CreativeGPX | 7 hours ago
This is the classic case of turning the population against each other so they don't fight the real enemy. There are plenty of poor boomers. There are plenty of well off younger people. Objecting to positive treatment of somebody because of age bracket is as nonsensical as flipping a coin to determine benefits.
Gandalftron | 19 hours ago
While this is obviously due to the accumulation of stock and property over a lifetime, maybe younger generations SHOULD VOTE in the same proportion as the elderly and exercise their political clout to ensure representatives pass more equitable laws. After all, the elderly are only going to decline in numbers.
badphish | 19 hours ago
Why do all the laws and systems mainly benefit old people?
OLD PEOPLE VOTE THAT'S WHY!
throwaway490215 | 16 hours ago
You should vote.
But note that voting has always skewed older.
What made boomers unique in history, is that they completely overwhelmed the older generation in numbers. By the time boomers turned 25~30 they had overwhelming political power. Sure, the older generations resisted the boomer ideas, but all society and political party had to pander to their needs and desires. They've held on to that power for decades and decades.
Millennials are a large generation as well, but they weren't overwhelmingly larger than their parents.
That is the difference that is easy to overlook and makes a lot of boomer advice so tone death and useless.
Runningwithtoast | 16 hours ago
I guess that could mean Gen A and onwards will face a lack of block voting power as their population shrinks compared to previous generations in developed countries.
vafrow | 14 hours ago
This is the part that fascinates me. That older cohort advantage will continue and increase with declining fertility rates.
You'll have generations that go through that are hampered by policies that favor the elderly at the expense of the young. Then they'll hold the power eventually when they're of age and aren't likely to dismantle the benefits they waited and paid for.
some_where_else | 9 hours ago
yes and makes it harder for the younger generations to in turn have kids and build a family - thus reinforcing the top heavy population pyramid. A cycle of demographic collapse that, absent major intervention, may lead to humanity simply evaporating.
vafrow | 8 hours ago
When the impacts of fertility rates come up, I always try to envision it happening when Millenials are the oldest cohort. When people get into these discussions and envision boomers supporting bad policy, it becomes hard to separate out the emotional aspect of it. People just assume the worst of the boomer generation and how they won't change anything.
But its really hard to seeing the Millennials being the dominant voting block and suddenly reversing things. By that point, they'll probably be seeing their retirement years being much harder than what their parents had. They won't see themselves as the bad guys as they'll see themselves as better than the boomers, and you can sense frustration with younger generations not appreciating how hard millenials had to battle the older generations on basic rights, especially from a younger generation, all they'll see is insufficient climate action and decades of mismanaged finances.
nostrademons | 8 hours ago
Eh the most likely outcome is that small cohorts of parents will exit from the system, strip it of resources, and use those resources to raise their kids. Concretely, that looks like founding AI companies or crypto scams, redirecting the pension funds and 401ks of retirees into buying them, rugpulling, and using the cash gained to fund private schools for their children.
The system's doomed, but individual groups within the system can usually find ways to survive at the expense of everybody else. The drive to survive and pass on your genes is usually a lot stronger than the drive to be good to strangers. On a side note, this is how lying and sociopathy continue to propagate within the gene pool.
nostrademons | 8 hours ago
This is a real concern for public education. In 1960 almost half of American households were families with kids, and many had 3-4 children. Today that number is barely 25%, and < 18% are married 2-parent households. It's hard to maintain political support for a large budget line item when < 20% of the population benefits from it.
We're already seeing this with continued neglect for public schooling and an exodus to private schools.
cavscout43 | 12 hours ago
The 26th amendment, in 1971, was the fastest ratified amendment in US history. Lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, caving to the Me Generation's demands. The Boomers carried an effective political plurality for decades, and mostly leveraged it on intergenerational wealth transfer through tax policy and financial deregulations which benefitted them.
When young, they demanded massive income tax cuts. Getting older, deregulation of real estate in favor of gambling with it (which culminated in the 2008 recession), Medicare Part D as they approached retirement (taxpayer funded Viagra and Cialis), axing the estate tax as their frugal Great War saver parents were about to pass to maximize inheritance, and now are loudly crowing for raising taxes on social security since they're withdrawing far more than they paid into the system and it's going insolvent.
weeyummy1 | 10 hours ago
Wow. This is very interesting analysis. They really have enacted systematic changes in their benefit at each life stage
naijaboiler | 5 hours ago
Add on they went to college at low cost to free. Then pulled the ladder after them. Repeatedly voted for government that kept cutting taxes.
For all of humanity, as a group, working age people were always richer than the elderly. We passed social security to reduce elderly poverty.
We have so overcorrected. Now the elderly are the richest by far. Sitting in big houses paid off, renting their second house out, adding new kitchens and additions while their kids can’t even buy 1 house. There are even places they are arguing to not pay property taxes.
The number one tennet of economics is that you get more of what you you incentivize. As a society, we have provide all sorts of subsidies for elderly and keep cutting aid to families. And then we wonder why society is getting older
Street_Anxiety2907 | 7 hours ago
They simply cared about their future and went out and voted for it, together, to make their future great. They are the wealthiest generation to have lived.
Something simple the following generations will never grasp.
alldressed_chip | 6 hours ago
i vote! but apart from getting involved in local and state politics, i'm in california, so my votes for president don't count. what is there left to grasp for people like me?
TheGrandWhatever | 7 hours ago
Selfish mfers
african_cheetah | 9 hours ago
I agree on no taxes on social security though. Social security itself is a tax that you pay throughout the working years. When getting it back in older years, why pay taxes on it again?
Creeps05 | 9 hours ago
To make the system financial sound.
Plus, only people who get higher benefits (i.e. richer people) get their benefits taxed.
DoctorUniversePHD | 4 hours ago
Get rid of the cap and it can go back to being tax free
goldmund22 | 18 hours ago
You mean, the older generation are the ones who have amassed all the wealth and have and continue to be the ones in power, and very reluctantly, if ever, release their grip (see Senator McConnell, amongst others).
it-was-nobody | 16 hours ago
Yes, but also because older generations have much more discretionary money, which they use to buy influence on politicians.
reddituser_05 | 16 hours ago
Not exactly.....Old People (over 65) only account for 20% of the US population, but 70% of them vote! Only 50% of 18-35 yrs old vote. Gen Z and Millennials need to get their asses in gear and vote!
trickster245 | 15 hours ago
Just look at other countries like Aus where voting is mandatory and the same problem occurs.
ellipses1 | 7 hours ago
I'm a millennial and i've voted in every primary and election since turning 18, but most of reddit doesn't seem to like what and who i vote for
Tissuerejection | 13 hours ago
Yup, everything in life is transactional. No politician will care about you , if you cant further their career. Go vote
Strange-Maize9536 | 19 hours ago
Did the boomers pass anything in the last 20 years that only benefited their age group. I am truly curious
Gandalftron | 19 hours ago
Yes. Its called The Tax Cuts And Jobs Act in 2017. Trump's signature tax reform bill that has not only been the greatest transfer of wealth from the lower/middle class to the ultra wealthy, but also is THE main reason the national debt has doubled over the last 10 years
transmorphik | 18 hours ago
There've been increases in the amount of money workers can shelter in tax-deferred and tax-free (Roth) retirement accounts, with supplements for workers who are 50+. There are also generous tax breaks for Qualified dividends and long-term capital gains that don't help 25 year olds who don't have cap gains yet.
The above changes aren't all age-specific, but older workers tend to earn more, and are likely more aware of having a limited time frame in which to shore up their retirement savings. Thus, older worker-investors benefitted more.
Strange-Maize9536 | 16 hours ago
So change the cap gain rates until you get money and then change them back
You realize most of capital gains is inflation and those dollars invested which have guava have already been taxed once (unlike wages and most ordinary income).
lozo78 | 11 hours ago
It only taxes the gains. So it's not double taxation.
ElephantRider | 14 hours ago
They show up to every local government meeting to block any zoning or regulation change that will allow any kind of housing to be built in their area, almost every major issue we face right now is a result of this
lechimpanzeu | 17 hours ago
Probably because old is preceding the new.
jventura1110 | 19 hours ago
A study from Tufts found that while many young eligible voters age 18-29 in 2024 cited among the reasons they did not vote was because they either did not like the candidates or did not feel that voting was important to them, they also faced barriers:
The most jarring comparison: 28% of young eligible voters who did not vote cited that they had conflicting work/school schedule, while that number logically decreased to only 4% of eligible voters 65+.
Actually, the group 65+ were more likely to cite that they did not vote because they did not like the candidates than the 18-29 group.
I.e. we should make voting day a federal holiday.
ItsMeSlinky | 19 hours ago
The fact that voting is a constitutional right and somehow it’s not a Federal holiday is just insane.
crustyrobots | 12 hours ago
Because if it was a Federal holiday then the fuckers couldn't use election day like a weapon by removing our access to vote and keep us all bent over the barrel
sworninmiles | 18 hours ago
The right to vote is actually not guaranteed by the Constitution
Dismal_Buy3580 | 10 hours ago
Quite so. We weren't a super democratic nation at the beginning.
Kershiser22 | 19 hours ago
Voting is open for like 12 hours. Do these people really not have an hour to spare during that 12 hours?
I also worry if it's a holiday, most of the people who currently claim they can't make time have jobs that will require them to work anyway.
PortableGeneration | 18 hours ago
I fail to see why mail in or absentee voting is not an option. I think I went to a polling place once in my life.
mccoyn | 9 hours ago
Also, early voting. I think, the issue is people don’t know they have these options. Given the lines for day-of voting during non-work hours, I would think most people should prefer early voting.
caseyfla | 17 hours ago
And every state except for Alabama, Mississippi, and New Hampshire offer early voting, mail-in voting, or both.
mckinley72 | 18 hours ago
Omg, just make it easier! What’s the argument against that? And no, many people don’t have a spare hour in their day (many wish they had an extra hour to just complete chores, let alone have time to critically think about politics. )
It’s 2026, we shouldn’t have to line up anywhere to vote.
Please explain your worry more? If we make it a holiday it’s fruitless? So sorry you’re worried about that, you have tough life.
(You should be thankful you have the free time to suck at riding bikes.)
Greedy_Sneak | 18 hours ago
It can be two things at once. It should be easier to vote and people who dont vote are fucking losers.
katzen_mutter | 15 hours ago
Have you heard of mail in voting?
Kershiser22 | 18 hours ago
I don't have any reason not to make election day a holiday. I just doubt it will improve voter turnout. I think most people who don't vote currently because they don't really care that much. A day off won't change that.
awhaling | 16 hours ago
I think making it a holiday would improve turnout substantially just by way of making it an explicit reminder.
mckinley72 | 18 hours ago
Your cynicism isn’t a good reason to not making voting easier.
I think if you expand your thoughts, it’s easy to see the issues.
Why don’t people care about politics? Lack of outlets for political education? Whatever happened to boring news?
I think we’ve lost what truely made this country special, briefly: a well educated public that prevented politicians from arguing in bad faith.
You sound like a dumb trust fund kid, just like our current POS
chaanders | 17 hours ago
A lot of people don’t like it because it starts an arguments and they feel like it’s easier to not care. Many don’t want to deal with learning about it, so they don’t understand why it affects them when it does. Making Election Day a holiday probably will only help a marginal amount, it’ll definitely help, but a lot of people will just take that time off and do something more fun instead.
Please try to be more civil when discussing stuff like this. u/kershiser22 was being respectful responding to you but you still insulted them. This may just be Reddit, but this is an economic forum and a place for people to discuss important topics maturely, this is not the YouTube comments section or Twitter.
mckinley72 | 16 hours ago
I apologize for my tone, stand by my points.
magic_crouton | 8 hours ago
How much easier can it be. Many places have mail in ballots and weeks of early voting at your leisure.
lozo78 | 11 hours ago
I have not waited more than 10 minutes to vote (always early voting) in years. And that's across 3 states and 7 counties.
norathar | 18 hours ago
Some of us work 11-12 hour shifts and would have to commute to the polling place. Only a 30 minute lunch and no other breaks, which wouldn't be sufficient to get to the polls, vote, and return.
(I've already voted absentee, but take that away and I would have a rather major problem on Election Day.)
Sure, healthcare workers at a hospital will probably have to work, but retail pharmacy would likely truncate the hours enough to get to the polls.
lozo78 | 11 hours ago
Early voting is a thing... And way less busy.
Original-Age-6691 | 10 hours ago
Early voting by me is only open during work hours (M-F, 9-3) and the only early voting site in the county is a 30m one way drive from about 75% of the population because our suburb is just across a county border, and the county courthouse and other facilities are in a different town on the other side of the county.
seventysevensevens | 12 hours ago
When I lived in Texas I had to go after work, which at the call center meant 4:30pm if I was lucky. There were always calls waiting so clearing the queue typically took till 5 or 530, then another 30 to 45 minute drive in traffic for a couple of miles to then wait over an hour to stand in line.
I'm lucky I don't have kids I had to pick up.
Now in Colorado, the default is I get mailed my ballot and a blue book that outlines every item being voted on (for state and local issues, plus judges reviews) instantly it's so much more convenient and I can drop it off at a ballot box vs mail and have the post office throw out a "liberal" ballot.
shakeyshake1 | 18 hours ago
Also you can bring kids to the polling place. I went with my mom in 1992 when she went to vote.
Those sound like a bunch of lousy excuses from people who didn’t want to tell the survey people that they just didn’t feel like voting.
Otterfan | 9 hours ago
In most of America, voting is open for weeks. Early voting barely makes a dent.
Young people just don't want to vote.
zeezle | 16 hours ago
Many places it's also open for WEEKS ahead of time. So you don't just need to make time during that 12 hours on one day. You need to make time during 12 hours on any of a bunch of different days for weeks ahead of time. And mail in is an option too.
The people I know who don't vote are simply mind-numbingly lazy and don't care.
Original-Age-6691 | 10 hours ago
Early voting is not open the same duration as polls are. Around me it's 9-3.
ColdFlamesOfEternity | 16 hours ago
I do vote, but I work a 12 hour shift and it definitely takes most of another hour out of the day to be on time and not leave early. Yes, technically my state protects leaving 2 hours early unpaid to vote with retaliation being illegal. There are a lot of moderate inconveniences, and my state has shortened early voting. They have also shortened how late voting stays open. The problem is that the increased unneeded restrictions will always push more and more people into nonvoting. It is why certain groups go hard against mail in voting. It is super convenient and leads to high turn out.
railbeast | 18 hours ago
Like, okay, maybe.
But is there a reason it's so fucking hard? Other countries manage by giving options on HOW to vote and giving the time off.
nicetrucknomoney | 11 hours ago
There are lots of people who really do work 12+ hour shifts buddy
Kershiser22 | 4 hours ago
That perfectly align with the hours that the polling place is open? That don't have mail in voting as an option?
lozo78 | 11 hours ago
Early voting is also widespread and sometimes weeks long.
ligma-lego-balls | 12 hours ago
The States doesnt have it as a Federal holiday? dang
magic_crouton | 8 hours ago
The younger generation need to look up voting laws in their states if they believe not having time off stops them. Also some (I won't say many anymore) states have mail in voting and early voting. At this point the only people who have excuses not to vote are those who legitimately live in states where voter suppression is hard in force.
naijaboiler | an hour ago
There’s a whole party and a sizable constituents who are invested in making sure the y ping don’t vote
Infinite-4-a-moment | 9 hours ago
>28% of young eligible voters who did not vote cited that they had conflicting work/school schedule
I believe they said that but that's kind of bullshit. In most places you can early vote and/or vote by mail for weeks ahead of the actual voting day. These people just don't make it a priority.
Malvania | 9 hours ago
Plus polling places are usually open for 12-14 hours. Assuming you get off work at 5-6, you hit the polling location on the way home
Conscious_Froyo5147 | 17 hours ago
At least in Virginia we have like a month to vote.
Ok-Tip-3560 | 18 hours ago
This is fucking laughable. In the 80s - 90s especially in the north east you had 1 day fo vote. Voting is so mich easier now.
JadedOccultist | 10 hours ago
Except in the places where they’re actively making it harder to vote.
Ok-Tip-3560 | 8 hours ago
By requiring identification? Look I grew up jn. State where we had 1 voting day. 1. None on Saturday none on Sunday. The process where one even applied for a man absentee ballot required an in person visit to the local town municipal building. Somehow all of these greatest silent and boomer generation despite working difficult stressful jobs that sometimes
Involved a 3 way round trip
Commute into the city were able to magically wake their asses up and to go vote.
Now the democrats / town simply mail me a ballot like 6-7 weeks prior to the election. I received it in September.
In southern states they are already voting In person. Literally 3 weeks of voting plus weekend days.
What voter disenfranchisement? If you can’t find a way to either get a mail in ballot or over the course of three weeks when you’re in a demographic least likely to be employed (seniors, “economically” marginalized people, etc) to walk or uber your ass or drive yourself or ride a fucking bike to the local polling station or elementary school where ppl vote then maybe you’re too stupid and or lazy and shouldn’t be voting.
JadedOccultist | 10 hours ago
Making voting day a federal holiday would do nothing except you could get a mattress for 50% off and Toyota would make a new ad campaign for it.
reflibman | 9 hours ago
I’ll get downvoted for this, but do you think the Boomers did not have the same problems as they aged? Yet the civic engagement levels are vastly different even going back to Gen-X (my cohort). That said, voting day should definitely be a federal holiday.
Quick-Quail-1683 | 17 hours ago
I’m all for making voting day a holiday, but this just seems kind of insane.
I’m in the Deep South, where it’s supposed to be incredibly difficult to vote, and we have early voting weeks in advance, with support for mail in ballots and the polling offices are open 12 hours a day.
I understand restrictions are location dependent, but everyone knows when Election Day is. If voting it’s important to you, then you can make time to vote.
isaidmypiece_chrissy | 9 hours ago
Agreed. I worked 10-12 hour days for multiple years when I was fresh out of college and I still made time to vote. Something like 22 states have same day registration at the polls. 47 states and DC offer early voting. 27 states have early voting offered during the weekend. I see kids with their parents at the polls every time I go, and I went with my parents to vote when I was a kid.
People are lazy and apathetic, that's the number one reason they don't vote, and many will refuse to admit it.
lozo78 | 11 hours ago
That's just an excuse. Early voting is widespread and can accommodate almost any schedule. Plus it's rarely busy in most places (outside of the start/end of the early voting).
katzen_mutter | 15 hours ago
Was one of the barriers not knowing how to mail a ballot?
Prestigious_Load1699 | 13 hours ago
We also need the government to wipe their ass while showing them how to fill out a mail-in ballot.
Unctuous_Robot | 7 hours ago
Keep in mind that most of the people who need that time off to vote will still have to come into work for some shitty Election Day super sale for the aforementioned boomers.
naijaboiler | 19 hours ago
And they want us to raise taxes on working age Americans to shore up soc security while they construe to cut taxes on their investment
NicolasCageFan492 | 19 hours ago
They’re trying to make this about age, when it’s actually about class. The top 1% has concentrated wealth and power. Even the top 2-10% has decreased its share of wealth since 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States
It’s the math of compound interest and the fact that capital is taxed less than wages.
redvsblueheeler | 19 hours ago
The two intersect. Older people tend to be wealthier.
dust4ngel | 16 hours ago
you don’t get billionaire wealthy just by being old
redvsblueheeler | 12 hours ago
The top 1% starts at $16M net worth, 50% of those households are over 65. So, if that’s who you’re talking about, you’re talking retired doctors and engineers. If you’re talking about billionaires, you’re referring to a specific set of ~900 people.
When you mix the two up, you end up conflating well off retired wage earners, roughly 700,000 households over 65, out of ~1.4 million households in the 1%, with 900 people who have over 62x that amount of money.
You’ll understand the nature of our economy a lot better when you realize that the 1% is a really large pool of mostly retirees who had good jobs and invested through one of the best periods of equity growth in history. The people you are conflating them with are the 0.001%.
TheTimberFactory | 6 hours ago
Can't both things be true though?
ants_are_everywhere | 17 hours ago
They've been trying to make it about age for a while.
During Covid there was a whole "just let grandpa die" movement. The idea was to not have covid restrictions, not care about the mortality rate of seniors, and hope that not having restrictions helped the economy grow.
We're seeing that same sort of logic elsewhere. Many people with a humans=workers=economic units view see seniors as a pure cost center.
And young people who are struggling economically it's easier to sell them on the idea of cutting costs by shifting burdens to the elderly.
Caresome71 | 18 hours ago
In 2026, social security taxed on earned income up $184,500 a year and in the year 2027. The tax cap will be $ 192,300
naijaboiler | 18 hours ago
I don’t care. Tax the wealthy of boomers to make social security whole. Not working age people who have student loans, are priced out of the housing market, are supporting kids, all to support elderly who underfunded government all through their working years
future_web_dev | 18 hours ago
You lazy brats would be able to afford all this if you just stopped buying your iPhones, lattes, and avocado toast!
/s
scorchedTV | 18 hours ago
Meh, boomers are collateral beneficiaries of policies that are designed to benefit the super rich. It is true they vote a lot, and the fact they they hold stock and land makes it easy to sell those policies to them. Mostly though, they benefit from the same policies that benefit the ultra wealthy. Make stock go higher. Get taxes less on capital gains. Favor corporate america above public good (thus favoring shareholders).
When boomers find themselves in a situation where their interests are not aligned with corporate america, they will get rolled over too.
princesoceronte | 15 hours ago
While I agree I'd also say in a lot of places you only get to vote for the same old vultures and the whole system has been captured.
The main reason why a lot of young people don't vote is because they can see there's no viable alternative. What we should do is build that alternative because no ammounts of voting can overcome the system as it is today.
morbie5 | 18 hours ago
> maybe younger generations SHOULD VOTE in the same proportion as the elderly and exercise their political clout to ensure representatives pass more equitable laws.
A large number of younger people are going to get decent to big inheritances from those boomers, they won't like what 'more equitable laws' would mean for that. So I'm not sure you have a big enough, agreeable 'younger people' voting block.
DisappointedSpectre | 13 hours ago
Fewer will than think they will - end of life care and health costs are skyrocketing and have been wiping out retirement wealth, and it's completely intentional.
The boomers will cling to a miserable existence as long as possible and spend everything they have to do so, and there are entire industries that retooled themselves to accommodate this desire and wring them dry before they kick off.
morbie5 | 4 hours ago
Not everyone needs expensive end of life care and Medicare will cover most of their other heath care costs.
But yes of the minority that need a nursing home or something similar that will be very expensive
tomz17 | 16 hours ago
>they won't like what 'more equitable laws' would mean for that.
#Truth. The idealism falls away the instant it affects your own pocket. For anyone waiting for the politics to change when the "boomers die of old age," the reality is that the current "youth" are just going to transition into boomer policies out of self-interest the instant they are the ones with power/privilege/property/assets, etc. that someone else wants to redistribute more equitably.
It's like that viral video where the interviewer went around UCLA asking for volunteers to sign an equity commitment form giving up their admissions spot to a member of the Tongva Tribe. Suddenly the ideal of equitable representation on campus was no longer as important. Similarly, look at how quickly the MAGA tribe turned when the price of gas/diesel shot up. It wasn't the other reprehensible nonsense this admin has done. It was the $2/gallon more they had to pony up out of their own pockets that broke the whole movement apart.
morbie5 | 4 hours ago
> Similarly, look at how quickly the MAGA tribe turned when the price of gas/diesel shot up. It wasn't the other reprehensible nonsense this admin has done. It was the $2/gallon more they had to pony up out of their own pockets that broke the whole movement apart.
Yup, and the same can be said for upper middle class left wing voters that are 'good on social issues' when it comes to higher taxes
red-123--- | 18 hours ago
I'm a boomer. PLEASE VOTE!
chrisk9 | 9 hours ago
Regardless of young people voting, it is responsibility of elected representatives to cultivate future prosperity which includes minding about career prospects, social mobility, and standard of living for youngest generations. Not just making donors and supporters happy to strengthen grip to power.
FreelyFound | 8 hours ago
Definitely vote, and encourage other youngish people to vote! You don’t need to wait until you’re old and wise (or just old, as the case may be).
But about the number of older people:
> The number of Americans ages 65 and older is projected to increase from 58 million in 2022 to 82 million by 2050 (a 42% increase), and the 65-and-older age group’s share of the total population is projected to rise from 17% to 23%.1
(From https://www.prb.org/resource/fact-sheet-aging-in-the-united-states/ )
explain_that_shit | 3 hours ago
Notwithstanding that the young have never voted in as large numbers as the old and there are obvious reasons for this (political awareness accumulating over time, time and ability to get to a polling station, suppression of candidates appealing to the interests of the young, etc.), the young ARE in fact voting in larger proportions these days than ever before, much to the consternation of the old and the media conglomerate owners who relied on the rate of youth vote not increasing all these years.
throwaway490215 | 16 hours ago
You should vote.
But note that voting has always skewed older.
What made boomers unique in history, is that they completely overwhelmed the older generation in numbers. By the time boomers turned 25~30 they had overwhelming political power. Sure, the older generations resisted the boomer ideas, but all society and political party had to pander to their needs and desires. They've held on to that power for decades and decades.
Millennials are a large generation as well, but they weren't overwhelmingly larger than their parents.
That is the difference that is easy to overlook and makes a lot of boomer advice so tone death and useless.
Yakb0 | 19 hours ago
>After all, the elderly are only going to decline in numbers.
The average age in the US is steadily increasing. There are going to be more and more old people as time goes on.
ThroatOne5167 | 19 hours ago
Yes soon all of the 200 year olds will be running things
Millennials and Gen Z have the numbers. If they'd motivate and VOTE they'd be the ones running the show.
But easier to blame their grandparents I guess
mistressbitcoin | 18 hours ago
Dont worry - millenniels and gen Z will run the show when they are old, and younger people will hate them for it. Just as ot always was.
Rupperrt | 19 hours ago
The U.S. population aged 65 and older is projected to grow from roughly 58 million to over 80 million by 2040–2050. By 2040, approximately 1 in 5 Americans will be 65 or older.
Elderly will have the numbers.
ThroatOne5167 | 19 hours ago
Hey dummy, that means 4 of 5 Americans will be under 65.
If you're a representative of that age group, I guess we should be happy you don't vote
Rupperrt | 18 hours ago
Yes, so the elderly population is increasing not declining.
I assume you’re Gen Alpha giving the name calling. Take a walk if you can’t hold conversations without getting emotional.
ExeUSA | 19 hours ago
You're conflating a bunch of things together.
Cohort theory is in play which is that generations don't actually get more conservative as they age, the cohort you're born into largely stays the same. Ie: Boomers were always conservative. Millennials are more than likely going to stay more liberal.
As long as a population has enough younger people to sustain growth, aging up (and out) doesn't really matter. The fact that Millennials didn't have enough kids to not make us getting older a burden is the problem. Your fact is missing the context of millennials are the largest generation of Americans, and they're not able to top that, due largely to economic factors.
Rupperrt | 18 hours ago
I don’t don’t really care for which of the two parties they vote for. It’s not like there is a huge difference apart from culture war bs, and I am not American.
Obviously there is immigration..
maplecremecookie | 18 hours ago
So fucking tired of hearing this. Show me a political party/candidate who actually gives a shit about issues that impact young people. In most places in Canada they simply don't exist. Young people basically get offered a choice between a shit sandwich and a bowl of shit, and then people yell at us because we don't want to vote.
space_force_majeure | 17 hours ago
Not wanting to vote is the problem though, not the other way around. Supporting grass roots campaigns for people you care about is how they get elected. Just look at Mamdani.
che-che-chester | 17 hours ago
> Young people basically get offered a choice between a shit sandwich and a bowl of shit, and then people yell at us because we don't want to vote.
Oh yeah, because us older folks just LOVE all the candidates. It's only young people who think they all suck. Yep, it's a unique problem for those poor young people.
maplecremecookie | 3 hours ago
Except pretty much every politician panders to old people, so y'all don't really have as much to complain about.
che-che-chester | an hour ago
No, politicians pander to voters. They don't give a shit what non-voters think. The number one goal of every politician is getting re-elected. For that to happen, you need to please the people who actually vote.
ETA: missing word
oxidized_banana_peel | 18 hours ago
Biden pushed to raise the corporate rate back to 28%, and let the top tax rate revert back to 39.2(?)% from 37%. That's a more progressive tax structure.
Obama raised the long term capital gains rate to 20% from 15%, added a net investment tax for high earners (an additional ~3.4(?)%). Similarly, that's a more progressive tax structure.
Obama passed the ACA, allowing kids to stay on their parent's health insurance until they're 26, and generally expanded access to healthcare to millions of people who otherwise didn't have a good way to get insurance.
Democrats led the passage of the stimulus bills for both the financial crisis and COVID. The former limited the impact of the crisis and helped the US boom over the next 12 years, years where unemployment for new college grads was exceptionally low. The latter heavily benefited service workers (who skew younger).
Biden attempted student loan forgiveness on a massive scale, and when that was blocked by Republican lawsuits and the supreme court, he successfully implemented student loan forgiveness for ~5(?)m borrowers totalling about $200(?)m.
oxidized_banana_peel | 18 hours ago
It's not the massive stuff I'd like to see (which has broad support in the Democratic party and broad opposition in the Republican party): public pre-k, single payer healthcare, labor protections for part time workers, and investment in transit unlocking larger housing markets (Chicago, for instance, has really effective regional commuter rail, and as a result is far less expensive a metro than its peer cities).
That stuff doesn't happen because young people don't vote as much as older more conservative generations. Gotta vote to get the results ya want.
OSPF99 | 17 hours ago
Single payer does not have strong support the second you mention that taxes will go up, and even lower when you longer wait times were mentioned.
There are other systems that would be less destructive than single payer that would give people universal health care coverage. I have no idea why people are dying on the hill of single payer.
oxidized_banana_peel | 14 hours ago
People like single payer because once you have it it's really hard to undo.
Longer wait times aren't a guarantee: first, wait times often suck ass in the US like they do elsewhere, second, that happens at the confluence of single payer (who pays) and nationalized health care (who administers services).
Taxes are a complicated idea, because it'd be a reallocation of money. Currently companies and individuals pay for health insurance and health care: those expenses would morph into taxes, and the net cost may decrease with a lower share of unemployed people (who still get health care, just generally it costs more because it's emergency care instead of primary care), reduced administrative cost, and reduced general complexity.
No arguments on there's being other ways to get the same outcome that may make more sense.
lozo78 | 10 hours ago
The conversation should start with talking about how health insurance premiums and copays going away.
maplecremecookie | 18 hours ago
So they changed a few percentage points but kept the status quo where everyone gets fucked by billionaires and corporations. I love stagnant wages, an impossible housing market, and watching the Earth get destroyed by greed!
rvasko3 | 17 hours ago
Yep, incremental progress is bad.
We must allow things to remain bad because a perfect solution doesn't exist.
_tolm_ | 9 hours ago
I see this so much in the UK as well … someone suggests something and the response is “but that will only raise X billion - that won’t solve everything” … like, yeh, obviously … but you gotta start somewhere and implement multiple things … no one is claiming there’s one thing that is a silver bullet.
maplecremecookie | 17 hours ago
This is why Democrats keep getting their asses handed to them. We need radical change now. Like something on the level that the New Deal was. Not these centrist pussies who pretend to care about the 99% while accepting corporate bribes.
rvasko3 | 9 hours ago
Cool.
How do you just make radical change happen?
Especially in a two party system where one side fights anything democrats try to do?
You people are lost.
Mittens_McFluffy | 17 hours ago
Democrats keep losing because stupid fucking young people don’t vote because they’d rather throw a goddamn tantrum that their perfect candidate doesn’t exist. Fucking run for office if they don’t exist, or vote in the primaries for the ones that do exist, until then what you’re spouting is dumb as fuck and you’re part of the reason why nothing ever fucking changes. Fucking little whiny bitch ass Gen Z babies
maplecremecookie | 17 hours ago
I'm a Millennial and I don't have the fucking time to run for office because I already work two jobs and can barely afford to stay alive. I have approximately $0 to put towards campaigning.
Also...no candidate is owed a vote just because Orange Man Bad or whatever you want to say. There are way too many DINO assholes who are sucking off Isreal, tech bros, bankers, and landlords.
Mittens_McFluffy | 17 hours ago
What you said translated “I would rather not vote for someone that would drive progress because they aren’t a perfect candidate for me, to allow the other candidate to win that’s going to put in place policies that will fuck me even harder”
Genius tier thinking. Enjoy your two jobs buckeroo.
Test-NetConnection | 13 hours ago
Neoliberals don't drive progress - they stem the bleeding. Republicans lower the corporate tax rate from 40% to 25%, then a neoliberal comes and "fixes" it by raising it back to 30%. Rinse repeat.
tomz17 | 16 hours ago
>So fucking tired of hearing this. Show me a political party/candidate who actually gives a shit about issues that impact young people.
It's a chicken and egg problem.... if young people don't show up to vote, no political agenda is ever going to prioritize their interests (esp. at risk of alienating more reliable voting blocs). As someone who canvassed for Bernie, I can tell you that young people simply DO NOT TURN OUT when it matters most. At best, they are a fickle/unreliable voting bloc from year to year.
>Young people basically get offered a choice between a shit sandwich and a bowl of shit, and then people yell at us because we don't want to vote.
Instead of being "So f'ing tired of this," how about just show up to vote consistently in every single election no matter what. Who cares if they cater directly to you. Pick the least worst candidate every single time. The boomers do. Whether the candidate excites them or not, they show up reliably each and every single election. They stand in line, rain or shine. That is why every politician is tripping over themselves to give them whatever they ask for.
ONLY ONCE you get those attendance numbers pumped are campaign strategists going to start pitching the issues important to your voting demographic in order to secure that vote.
Deep90 | 17 hours ago
Because candidates cater towards the existing voterbase. Not people who don't vote.
If young people were a larger share of the voterbase, I don't believe for a second you'd have this problem.
Your problem is essentially self-inflicted by young people who don't participate with the idea that someone will one day their unlikely vote. They won't.
Right now young people can't be relied on for winning elections and so politicians don't rely on them.
They have more reliable people willing to help them win, and they are called voters. That is who they chase. The average voter. Young people need to move that average if they want more attention.
Mlabonte21 | 17 hours ago
Bernie Sanders. Twice.
Voters made it clear— they do not want those policies. They seem to prefer all the amazing policies Hilary and Biden were pushing.
Oryzae | 6 hours ago
> then people yell at us because we don't want to vote
Yeah that one is deserved. Fucking vote, it’s easy.
Rupperrt | 19 hours ago
They’ll increase and not decline in numbers.
Gandalftron | 19 hours ago
Oh yes? Boomers will increase in numbers as time goes on? Please explain this one to us.
Rupperrt | 18 hours ago
Elderly will yes. Boomers obviously won’t. You wrote elderly will decline in numbers.
that0nemook | 16 hours ago
Gen z voted for fascism because Tiktok told them to.
DisappointedSpectre | 13 hours ago
If a few more Russian datacenters get blown up by Ukrainian drones that might be less of an issue this time around.
a_library_socialist | 12 hours ago
"The kids don't show up to vote for my shitty neoliberal candidates? Could it be that that's a bad electoral strategy?
No, it must be the nefarious Asiatic Russians! "
Moldy_Birdie | 19 hours ago
there isn’t as many young people as old people, demographics matter in a democracy
edit: for clarity, I meant regarding eligible voters - 49m young people eligible to vote versus 64m boomers
zzzacmil | 19 hours ago
The median age of eligible voters is 48. So 50% of eligible voters are under 48. The oldest millennials today are 45. So actually no, millennials and younger could easily decide elections if they just voted at similar rates as older people do.
sparkleptera | 19 hours ago
This is very recent. The boomers have been dying at a pretty steady clip since 2020
zzzacmil | 19 hours ago
This is not recent. The US has a low birth rate, so the country is getting older, not younger. Young people have always made up a significant share of eligible voters, they just have never really voted.
MWH1980 | 19 hours ago
They still got a lot of time to keep making bad decisions.
Beneficial_Link_8083 | 19 hours ago
Millennials out number boomers by 5 million
StrebLab | 19 hours ago
Yup. Millennials overtook boomers in 2015.
PatsFanInHTX | 19 hours ago
Not sure how you are defining this because there are definitely more young people than old people.
Etheon44 | 10 hours ago
Well, in many countries, especially in europe, is more than older people are more, simple as that, so politics are towards them
1234nameuser | 10 hours ago
Love how everyone keeps using this as an excuse to fuck over my non voting age kids
some_where_else | 9 hours ago
Sometimes I think this could be fixed by making voting mandatory for the under 65s.
Avatele | 19 hours ago
?they going to rise in number proportionally as birth rates decline.
CautiousOptimism09 | 19 hours ago
Yeaaaaahhhhh voting isnt fixing this
zvexler | 19 hours ago
Not voting will totally fix it /s
Caresome71 | 18 hours ago
If we stop voting things only become worse if we continue to vote and support. Enlightened Candidates things will get better. It will be slow but it will work. What comedy decades it's taken the republicans to screw things up so badly. Fixing it will take time.
EchoFieldHorizon | 18 hours ago
Then show us a better way. There isn’t one.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 13 hours ago
Oh, they have way.
Look at France.
CautiousOptimism09 | 9 hours ago
👆
StrebLab | 19 hours ago
True. Complacency and complaining on reddit is probably the best path forward.
DoesNotArgueOnline | 17 hours ago
You vote solely to on whether you want a blue president allowing Isreal to commit a genocide or a red president allowing Isreal to commit a genocide.
Sometimes the blue one throws us a bone, but it's never much
I still vote, but I do so with this knowledge
So_HauserAspen | 18 hours ago
> In early 2001, the CBO projected under current-law baselines that the federal government would completely erase its debt held by the public by 2006, and that the U.S. government would accumulate a cumulative surplus of roughly $5.6 trillion through 2011.
https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/107th-congress-2001-2002/reports/senate.pdf
Tax cuts for the rich were an upwards wealth transfer that they used to our politicians and judges.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 13 hours ago
I recall something happening right around the time of those rosy projections.
Oh yeah - tech market crashed and the NASDAQ lost 77% of its value.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dotcom-bubble.asp
That said, the Bush tax cuts were a major mistake.
TimSylvester_ | 4 hours ago
Right? Bush inherits a balanced budget from Clinton and immediately blows it to smithereens.
Because Republicans are welfare queens who feel entitled to free money from the government!
Every accusation is an admission, and this was true long before Trump.
Diligent_Rise6636 | 11 hours ago
then 2008 happened
mpbh | 16 hours ago
This is just a fancy way of saying the stock market went up 38% in the last 3 years. I'm a 35 year old millennial with all my money in the S&P500 and I also got 38% richer.
Previous_Cattle_5545 | 10 hours ago
Yea the boomer bashing is a bit much here on Reddit. Of course they have money, they have been saving for years. Compounding interest and the like. It's a marathon not a sprint. As you go through life your income should naturally go up. When it does the secret is to not increase your lifestyle, but increase your savings. Most people don't and option for the Bimmer instead of the 10 year old car. It's just how it works. It's not how much you make, it's how much you save.
caffeinebump | 7 hours ago
It’s insane. Yes, most wealthy people are boomers, but most boomers aren’t wealthy.
naijaboiler | 5 hours ago
It's not by accident. its not that they are smarter or just older. It's primarily because of the choices we have made in how strucgture wealth, who gets to keeep what, who gets public subsidiesand who doesnt.
weatherwar | 4 hours ago
This article is just reddit-bait as I call it.
And, oh look, it's upvoted and generating tons of clicks.
mdthornb1 | 7 hours ago
Yep…my 401k gained a stupid amount over this time.
reddit_equals_censor | 11 hours ago
"please look at your neighbor owning a house, but NEVER EVER look at the billionaires murdering millions as we speak ok? please accept this proaganda."
aReelProblem | 19 hours ago
Put money into your retirement folks asap. You’d be amazed how a little every check can add up over several years. Dad invested into his retirement for 40 years and when I had to take over his finances due to serious medical issues (seriously bad stroke) I was fuckin flabbergasted because I saw the amount 9 years ago when he retired and what he has in there now is significantly more. Getting on top of that retirement is key even if that 100/mo fuckin hurts because he said it hurt like hell when I was little but he knew better.
Ok-Tip-3560 | 18 hours ago
The power of compounding.
gatosaurio | 14 hours ago
You're asking people to do sensible investing on a website where the solution to every problem is "tax the rich!". I hope you reach someone, but I doubt it
Prestigious_Load1699 | 13 hours ago
Still worth the effort.
Twerck | 8 hours ago
Both ideas can be true. You can amass a nice sum of money over decades through investing and also tax billionaires who sit on concentrations of wealth and lobby to increase that wealth at the cost of our quality of life.
rampantcloudydays | 11 hours ago
You say that like the current "no tax on the rich" is a good meta.
TimSylvester_ | 4 hours ago
"I live paycheck to paycheck. I have $10 I can spend on beans and rice... orrrr I can invest it, and in 10 years, I'll have $20 to spend on beans and rice! I'll just eat air until my next paycheck!"
You're handing out advice that only works when people have savings to invest, then acting superior about it.
Ok-Tip-3560 | 2 hours ago
For 98 percent of young ppl - DoorDash Uber Eats less. I guarantee that every single one of you spends at like 40 bucks a month and some of you over a g a month on food delivery bullshit.
TimSylvester_ | 2 hours ago
You should write out of touch articles for publications only the upper middle class read so that the readers can feel superior about themselves.
Ok-Tip-3560 | 2 hours ago
You can’t be angry and upset by facts. Sorry not sorry that it’s a fact that Gen Z turds who complain about money waste tons of it on food service delivery rather than meal prepping or brown bagging.
This is exactly why kids who make 40-50k a year who sometimes don’t even drive and who live at home no rent and parents still pay for their cell phone bill can’t get ahead. Very few are hustlers.
TimSylvester_ | 2 hours ago
You are better than everyone else. I know how much you need to hear that. You're better, and smarter, and they're just stupid little dummies. Good job!
republicanssuck123 | 11 hours ago
those returns will not continue.. it is unsustainable
cazidnb | 10 hours ago
Future wagies won't have money to put aside in the first place.
Rena1- | 12 hours ago
The boomers that can afford healthcare are still alive, the poor ones are dying and need the gen z workers to share their income so they can stay alive.
It's not a generation issue, it's a class issue.
magic_crouton | 8 hours ago
This is exactly it.
DeathEnducer | 9 hours ago
There are a lot of poor boomers. The issue is not generational war. The issue is class war. The landed boomers and landed GenZ work together against the Boomers getting by on social security and the GenZ making low wages.
artisanrox | 6 hours ago
Poor Boomers still voted for most of the policies that got us here.
wbruce098 | 4 hours ago
This. My boomer dad is broke as shit. I’m doing much better and my kid likely will be as well, because we both had access to greater opportunity than he did.
But our paychecks go much less further because of the billionaires, and not just the idiot boomer billionaires. The idiot GenX and millennial billionaires too.
bleedturkeygravy | 10 hours ago
The money has already been blocked from the younger generations. It was concentrated with the boomers. Now, the hoarding class is going to bleed the boomers dry with healthcare costs and reverse mortgages.
ITS A ROBBERY!!
brute-forced | 19 hours ago
What’s the thing about the boomers though… When you look at the boomers all around the United States of America what do you see… What you see is a bunch of people that don’t give a shit about the younger people and they continue to vote and that direction and they do not give one fuck about you even eating avocado toast
Shantomette | 18 hours ago
It would also help if we realized this is bot level bullshit to divide people. https://fortune.com/2026/09/22/gen-z-wealth-income-vs-boomers-millennials-richest-generation-great-expectations/
ThroatOne5167 | 19 hours ago
One way to combat that is to get younger people to vote too. There are more of them after all.
naijaboiler | 5 hours ago
but guess what stops young people from voting the most? work, school commitments, family commitments. Easy solution will be making voting more flexible, more early voting sites, longer voting periods, mail-in ballots,
Guess who keeps voting for the party that tries to stop all those things. yup boomers. It's easy to find time to vote when you ar eretired.
Previous_Cattle_5545 | 10 hours ago
Do you meant they vote in their own self interests? Well I can't imagine! Who does that?
[OP] marketrent | 19 hours ago
Excerpts from article by Nick Lichtenberg, citing Federal Reserve release, BofA analysis, and WSJ post, with commentary by Nick Maggiulli and Samuel Moyn:
[...] The Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Consumer Finances revealed a striking split: Median net worth rose roughly 38% for households headed by someone 75 or older between 2022 and 2025, while falling 23% for those headed by someone under 35. Both figures account for inflation, according to an analysis by Nick Maggiulli, chief data officer at Ritholtz Wealth Management and author of The Wealth Ladder.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the age split in a short post on what it called “the gold standard for measuring household wealth,” which the central bank releases every three years. Americans 55 and over now hold roughly $140 trillion, about three-quarters of the nation’s net worth, Fortune reported this month, citing a Bank of America Institute analysis of the Fed data.
The oldest households finished the period with a median net worth of $504,600, up from $366,288 in 2022, measured in 2025 dollars. For the youngest households, it fell from $42,725 to $32,820. The oldest group now has roughly 15x the wealth of the youngest, compared with about 9x three years earlier.
Across all families, inflation-adjusted median net worth rose just 2% between 2022 and 2025, reaching $215,900. That modest national gain concealed sharply different experiences at opposite ends of the age spectrum.
The findings also echo an argument Yale law and history professor Samuel Moyn made in an interview with Fortune this summer about his book, Gerontocracy in America: The concentration of wealth among older Americans is not merely a matter of who has had longer to save. In his account, it also shapes whose interests the economy and political system serve.
Moyn describes an “oldigarchy,” in which older, disproportionately wealthy Americans hold outsize influence. His book argues that “aging Americans control the biggest bank accounts and stock portfolios,” and that “the old rich have pulled away from everyone else.”
Asked about the latest Fed figures, Moyn responded by email that they further prove his thesis. “The question is whether the age correlation of the haves versus have-nots with the older versus the younger is fair,” Moyn ventured. “And it isn’t. So this is a case of the older getting richer, not just the rich getting richer.”
“The boomers have created a new American system of rule, which reserves power—including in the form of wealth—for later life,” he told Fortune. “And that is the wrong time for power, including in assets and resources.”
The Yale professor added that he does not expect the pattern to end here. Boomers, he wrote, “lucked out in acquiring a lot early and enjoying several asset bubbles along the way,” but the issue is older asset owners in general. “The pattern will increasingly be wealth concentrated towards the upper end of the age spectrum.”
[...] When Fortune first talked to Maggiulli, in August 2025, about his book The Wealth Ladder, he said there’s “something weird” going on in the economy, a problem of too much affluence and numbers that do not always match how people feel.
“The economy wasn’t built to handle this many people with this much money,” he told Fortune. More recently, he described an “upper-middle-class trap,” in which even high earners find themselves working harder to buy declining-quality products and services.
His latest analysis gets at another version of that disconnect: Rising asset prices can make the economy look prosperous while leaving younger households behind. If you already have a house and a portfolio, your wealth can grow without much additional effort. If a large share of what you own is your car, the same economy can deliver a very different result.
The divide also fits a longer-running pattern. A 2025 paper submitted to the National Bureau of Economic Research by Edward Wolff found that average wealth among households under 35 fell from 21% of the national household average in 1983 to 16% in 2022. That measures relative wealth, not an outright decline in dollars, but it shows younger households falling further behind the country as a whole.
Even within wealthy families, Moyn told Fortune, the timing can work against younger generations. “We have this syndrome even within wealthy families of folks waiting around on their parents to inherit them,” he said. “It’s so late. It’s the wrong time in life for people to come into their house or their wealth.”
vinyl1earthlink | 19 hours ago
If your net worth is $500K, and $400K is house equity, you really don't have much money if you are not longer working. You can't eat your house, and you have to have a place to live.
PatchyWhiskers | 19 hours ago
Owning a house helps elderly people a lot because it allows them to live off their retirement savings, social security, or maybe a part-time job.
Kelsig | 19 hours ago
you get a reverse mortgage
ArbysLunch | 19 hours ago
Tom Selleck steps from the shadows
GenericFatGuy | 18 hours ago
A paid off house is the best thing you can have as a middle class person.
NoamLigotti | 19 hours ago
Yes same with people with $5 million homes whose net worth is 4.9 million. Those poor victims. Do people know nothing about basic economics?
Prestigious_Load1699 | 12 hours ago
Sounds like they have $100K or so in a retirement fund, which can be drawn from to supplement Social Security income.
The lesson here is to invest early and often.
guachi01 | 17 hours ago
You've been scammed. Congratulations.
Real median net worth changes by age group:
<35
2019-2022 +141%
2022-2025 -23%
2019-2025 +85%
65-74 (conveniently left out of the article)
2019-2022 +33%
2022-2025 -4%
2019-2025 +28%
75+
2019-2022 +13%
2022-2025 +38%
2019-2025 +56%
Tell us which of these three age groups has done best over the past 6 years
guachi01 | 17 hours ago
I like how obviously bogus this article is and how many people in the comments are falling for it.
Real median net worth for <35 soared from $17.76k in 2019 to $42.72k in 2022. That's a 141% increase. Then it decreased to $32.82k or a 23% decrease. That's still 2nd highest of all time and 85% higher than in 2019.
The "wealthy boomer" is 75+ (but not the 65-74 category for some reason). Their net worth increased 13% from 2019 to 2022 (a lot less than 141%) and then increased 38% from 2022 to 2025. Combined that's a 56% increase over six years, or less than the 85% for <35.
But wait! The 65-74 group, who are also boomers, saw a 33% increase from 2019 to 2022 and a 4% decrease from 2022 to 2025 for a net increase of 28%. That's a lot less than 85%, too.
Anyone who took this article at face value got hoodwinked.
Hairy_rambutan | 13 hours ago
I can't speak for all boomers everywhere, but I do know that in my family, every one of us over 60 is supporting our millenial and Gen Z kids financially. Paying their university costs, buying them cars, either housing them directly or helping them buy a home.
MDMarauder | 6 hours ago
Found the boomer who got 38% richer.
My boomer parents, just like almost every boomer parent of my Gen X friends and relatives, gave me a deadline to leave home on my 18th birthday. No financial or moral support whatsoever, just the parting advice of "figure it out".
Now, they're elderly and having difficulty living independently on their own. In the decades since I left home, they amassed quite the real estate portfolio and an impressive amount in savings. I built a life on the other side of the country and now they want me to drop everything and relocate in order to help care for them.
I gave them some sage advice, "figure it out".
soitgoes75 | 7 hours ago
My wealthy boomer parents loaned me $2,000 toward a down payment. Yes, I had to pay it all back. That is the only thing they have ever done for me financially. They have done nothing for my son who is a senior in college. They hoard their wealth like dragons.
tribriguy | 9 hours ago
This is embarrassingly bad economic journalism. Did anyone involved in writing or editing this take even an introductory statistics course?
The article breathlessly reports that younger Americans have been financially “wiped out” because median wealth declined 23% from 2022 to 2025. What it conveniently buries is that their wealth increased roughly 140% in the preceding three years. Do the elementary arithmetic and they’re still up approximately 85% in real terms since 2019.
Then it compares wealth among people under 35 with people over 75, apparently hoping readers won’t understand lifecycle wealth accumulation, compounding, or the problems with comparing changing age cohorts.
Worse, the article actually acknowledges some of these methodological problems and proceeds with the sensational narrative anyway.
This is Statistics 101 stuff. Cherry-pick the endpoints, ignore the relevant context, confuse correlation with explanation, and manufacture a generational economic catastrophe.
And journalists wonder why the public is losing confidence in their profession. This is precisely why.
zajo_throwaway | 9 hours ago
Excellent points, though I think the cherry-picking etc. is exactly due to the journalists involved understanding, rather than misunderstanding, statistics.
Remember, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
A related nitpick regarding your final sentence:
> And journalists wonder why the public is losing confidence in their profession. This is precisely why.
A big part of the problem is readers increasingly favouring bad journalism over good journalism.
Clickbait and ragebait are everywhere, because, sadly, it works. People fall for it.
Don't blame the media when the people are happily complicit.
Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur
tribriguy | 9 hours ago
Fair points. I agree readers are complicit, and I think there’s an important economic factor at work here.
The move from print to digital media fundamentally changed the business model. Publishers once relied largely on subscriptions and advertising tied to their readership. Now every click, share, and comment is measurable engagement with economic value. And the more engagement something generates, the more valuable it becomes.
Unfortunately, outrage and sensationalism are particularly effective at generating engagement. Publishers are responding quite rationally to an economic incentive that often rewards provocative content over sound analysis. Readers certainly play a role, but the incentives have changed dramatically.
I don’t have a great solution to that. There’s real value in engagement and the ability to measure it. I wouldn’t want to lose those benefits.
I also think we’re still relatively early in the Information Age. The technology and economics of information have changed much faster than our ability to navigate and critically evaluate what we consume.
I’m reasonably optimistic that we’ll get better at it over time. Consumers will become more discerning, publishers and platforms will adapt, and we’ll develop better habits for evaluating information and tempering some of the more reactionary behavior.
At least I hope so. We’ve had remarkably little time to adapt to a pretty fundamental change in how information works.
zajo_throwaway | an hour ago
Your optimism is laudable, and somewhat inspiring.
Personally, as a transhumanist, I do think we'll eventually get there and overcome these challenges.
But in the current century, I can only see society as a whole growing more and more complex and chaotic, and human cognition (and thus rationality) failing to keep up, even if augmented with computers.
handsoapdispenser | 9 hours ago
And of course the headline alone generated thousands of upvotes
m81147 | 8 hours ago
It’s an unfortunate truth about our current reality. People don’t value proper journalism, they value attention/clicks. It’s more lucrative to write a bad piece with a sensation headline that report legitimate facts.
magic_crouton | 8 hours ago
They do it on purpose.
debt-xyz | 9 hours ago
When my three kids graduated HS I gave them $$. I told them to be fruitful and multiply. Now they own properties, stocks; have good jobs and children. Distribute the wealth you Boomers.
Some-Leopard5025 | 7 hours ago
Having children shouldn't be dependent on the whim of people with one foot in the grave.
Gambizy | 5 hours ago
My boomer father told me he had it way harder than me. This was after telling me his father bought a business for him for 300000$ (today’s value) and received 18000$ (today’s money) every quarter. He is now probably worth 15-20 million. I get 250$ on my birthday which basically paid for dinner for my wife and I that night.
Jin-Gitaxias-Mom | 2 hours ago
I’m sorry you have such a stingy father, that’s honestly just sad
Substantial-Ad-8575 | an hour ago
Wow, my dad paid for my college in late 80s. But I also got partial scholarships so some of his money, I invested. Lost and learned, now that initial $35k is in &6m-$7m range.
Add more of course over my years of working.
*****
I have 4 children 25-32. Best thing we did was give them information on living costs, saving/investing, and it’s ok to live with roommates to be able to add to investments…
They are doing well. All 4 bought homes in last 2 years. Oldest son found out in March, wife due with twins and they had 9 month old. So moved from 3 bdrm to 5 bdrm house, sold old for $415k, got large place for $565k. Small amount to finance.
Youngest daughter 25, been working in her chemical engineering job for 4 years. Split $1100 2 bdrm and saved money. Bought new build 3/2/2 starter home in Austin. 1380 sqft, and put half down.
But we do get it. Not everyone is good with education or even worse don’t know to save or willing to save. Ugh…
DragonSnooz | 5 hours ago
My mom's parents gifted their daughters 3 houses each.
My mom has told me, "Oh, I would help you buy a house if I could".
Meanwhile my mom has subscriptions to 5 wineries, etc.
Boomers are something else.
artisanrox | 6 hours ago
100%. Wealth was not distributed to GenX and Millenials because so many retirees are just doing the YOLO life. Absolutely zero thought of any kids they produced.
Substantial-Ad-8575 | 2 hours ago
Hmm, wow.
57, will be 58 later this year. Yeah, NW went up greatly. 97% of our Net Worth is stocks. Seen great increases, in most years. Up 67% since Jan 2020. Heck up 18% since Jan 2026. Great, I can pull more tax free principal from my trusts.
I also have 4 children 25-32. And their NW also went up. All 4 bought homes in last 2 years. All have no/little college bent, but each holds 2 baccalaureates. Used state grants, partial scholarships and work to pay tuition/books/dees for college. All have nice STEM careers. Yeah 6 digit starting wages. They max retirement and add to investments.
So NW went up went for them also. Their portfolio seeing increases, some good gains with oldest daughter 28% so far this year for increases. Steady growth with their 401k, IRA, Roth accounts. Emergency HYSA are seeing steady 6%.
Seems to be many are unable/unwilling to save/invest. Those that do are seeing good to great returns. My children, lived with roommates, max retirement, add to investments and saved to buy a home. Older 3 are married, so double 6 digit incomes.
_DCtheTall_ | 3 hours ago
My maternal grandfather did not offer me a cent for college (no idea if he did to my mom), but don't worry, he did spend 2x my total tuition for my entire degree on a boat he stepped on twice before selling at a massive loss.
We were not close by the time he passed.
StrebLab | 19 hours ago
Get ready. They are about to vote to increase younger people's payroll taxes too so their social security doesn't take a hit.
I actually don't disagree. Social security tax probably does need to go up for everyone, but I think it should be done gradually over 10-15 years so that the sucky part is spread more fairly between the younger people who will be paying more and the older people who grossly under-contributed to social security during their working years.
derelictdiction | 17 hours ago
Is this a joke? A 12.4% payroll tax just for SS is insane and should not be increased
We need to remove the income cap on SS tax before we raise the rates a penny.
Federal tax + SS tax + medicare/medicaid + state + property is currently around 55% of my gross. That's scandanvian county tax rates but I sure as hell don't have free healthcare, public transit, free university, childcare, etc.
Just corporate subsidies, inflation, unaffordable healthcare, $37 trillion in debt from wars.
mountainlifa | 5 hours ago
Exactly. And if you're self employed like me, you get to pay the full 15.3% tax on the entire earnings. Meanwhile I like in a neighborhood with super rich boomers who collect social security for their wine subscriptions. Remove the income cap and also offer an option to opt out of the system altogether. I don't want social security and I don't want to subsidize the lives of wealthy people.
dopechez- | 15 hours ago
It's $40 trillion in debt now
StrebLab | 9 hours ago
Not joking. Removing the cap is one lever that could be pulled, but Americans don't pay enough for social security to keep is solvent. We need to pay more into it if we care to have the program. "Get someone else to pay for it" isnt a valid strategy.
broadviewstation | 16 hours ago
But we were always told the us has lower taxes than canada
Nojopar | 9 hours ago
It has to go up even if we remove the cap. It should have gone up 30 years ago but Boomers and Silent Gen in Congress didn’t do it so here we are.
nativeindian12 | 9 hours ago
Raising the cap will increase taxes on a huge portion of the middle class. Most wealthy people don’t make much in terms of actual income.
Jeff Bezos salary at Amazon is $81,000 per year. So he would be entirely unaffected.
You would be taking money from engineers, doctors, CRNAs, tech guys, even like police who do a lot of overtime and giving that money to retired boomers. This would be terrible for the economy
weatherwar | 4 hours ago
>Raising the cap will increase taxes on a huge portion of the middle class.
That's not the middle class.
theeightfoldpog | 18 hours ago
If they wanted to have thier social security stable, maybe they shouldn't have consistently voted for candidates that cut taxes and increase the debt. No let's just let them fuck over the future generations one last time as they roll into thier grave.
AlwaysTired97 | 17 hours ago
Yeah, I want social security to support our elders. But a large amount of our current elderly population who want to keep their social security also voted for the party that cut rich people's taxes, cut other important social programs like medicaid and food stamps, and generally tries to stomp out any policy that even feels a little bit like "socialism". While still raising the deficit anyway spending tons of money on f*cking bullshit like starting a new fcking war for no reason.
These people essentially believe "We want ours and for you to go f*ck yourself".
I still sympathize will all of our elders who are normal or good people, but the selfish and crazy ones who think they're owed everything while wanting everyone else to get f*cked get none from me.
Ok_Flounder59 | 17 hours ago
The irony of boomers yearning for a time when the country invested much more into social programs, schools, universities, infrastructure, etc. while continuing to vote to cut all of those things being completely lost on them drives me absolutely crazy
AlwaysTired97 | 16 hours ago
Some of them I think are just genuine idiots who can't form any opinion without being to told to so without Fox News telling them to.
And then some of them I do think actually understand the complexities of it, or at least some of them, but don't care anyway and do very seriously believe in "getting theirs" and screwing over everyone else along the way.
I've known older people who will brag about how without even completing high school they were able to get a job that allowed them to buy a house, support a family, get healthcare, get a pension, and retire comfortably. They're fully aware of how well they had it, and how much harder it is for young people to get by today.
Yet they continue to support and vote for everything that allows for it to stay that way or allow it to continue to get worse. And they just don't care about the irony or hypocrisy. They want theirs, and f*ck anyone else. I have literally heard some of these people say that young people should go f*ck themselves and that they don't care about their problems, only their own. It really it is "I got mine, and screw everyone who comes after me".
Though realistically I think most of these types of people fall somewhere in between both being a moron, and being a selfish ladder-puller.
Few_Fish8771 | 16 hours ago
they should have a social security tax on stock dividends, capital gains, property taxes, and higher income. then the burden of social security taxes fails more on the wealthy especially asset owners and less on everyone else.
StrebLab | 9 hours ago
This makes the most sense to me. Cap gains have enjoyed extremely favorable tax treatment and investment growth is the primary driver of the growing wealth gap. It isn't because of some California software engineer who is paying 45% of their income in taxes already.
naijaboiler | 5 hours ago
or some doctor who spent all his 20s and earl 30s in school and has 500k debt and is just finally starting a family.
Go tax grandpa sitting on 2 paid houses, going to Bahams to watch sports events, adding a new kitchen to his house so he can tempt his grandkids to come visit
Dusty_Coder | 5 hours ago
Just what peoples retirement money needs.. another tax on it
420everytime | 4 hours ago
Just tax land.
Any other kind of asset can be moved or hidden, but land has an owner that can be taxed. Even if it’s a shell corporation
ss_lbguy | 18 hours ago
They need to get rid of the max income subject to social security tax. It is $184k in 2026.
Worth-Leg3715 | 17 hours ago
Exactly, remove the cap.
Also, I would attach it the tax to loans where stock is used as collateral and on dividends/distributions paid out.
Obviously we would need to establish a threshold. Possibly 500k in dividends/distributions or stock used as collateral.
riffraff325 | 11 hours ago
Stock loans have interest applied and the principal amount of the loan is paid back. Why should they also be taxed? Is your home equity loan or any other loan that is paid back taxed?
Worth-Leg3715 | 7 hours ago
Easy - regular folks arent using stock as collateral to obtain loans.
So yes, at a certain level they should be taxed as the ultra wealthy use it as a way to not pay taxes on sold stocks. Borrow, borrow and die is a loophole the ultra wealthy use.
The govt has to raise taxes somehow to pay for these shortfalls.
riffraff325 | 3 hours ago
Assuming a gain, there is a tax at the sale of the shares. If the shares are not sold there is no tax.
Are you taxed on loans you take out? Imagine the impact to credit markets that if in addition to interest charged, the loan amount is also taxable to the borrower. What you are advocating for makes zero sense.
For the average person, the largest source of proceeds ever received are probably the gain from the sale of a primary residence and an inheritance of non retirement assets which get a step up in basis at death, neither of which are taxed to the seller/ recipient.
Again, why should a loan that is paid back with interest be also taxable to the borrower? The bank or brokerage includes interest received as earnings.
Worth-Leg3715 | 3 hours ago
It wouldn’t destroy credit markets because wealthy people would still be saving vs paying taxes. Capital gains rates is far higher than a 6% surcharge for to bolster Social Security.
If they use stock as collateral for a large loan they are doing so to NOT sell stock and trigger taxes.
A lower to middle class person isn’t using millions of dollars worth of stock as collateral. Wealthy people do this to save more than 23% that the taxes would eat it.
The surcharge would only affect the uber wealthy.
The real question would be …. How much can actually be raised and would it be worth it? The govt has a unique skill of creating 1 dollar in tax but spending 20 dollars.
riffraff325 | 3 hours ago
Many who are not ultra wealthy will pledge shares in a margin account. Should that investment strategy also be taxable?
Worth-Leg3715 | 2 hours ago
Nope - as most margin accounts are taxable. Also they aren’t using margin to skip out on taxes, as they will pay taxes. Now if someone wants to use margin in a Roth, then they already paid their taxes up front.
The ultra wealthy are using their millions and billions in stock to secure low interest loans, instead of selling the stock which triggers capital gains.
It won’t stop the uber wealthy from using the stock as collateral. It just lets them pay some taxes, instead of 0 taxes.
riffraff325 | 2 hours ago
Use of a margin account is not taxable. There are some qualified dividend considerations but for the most part the margin strategy itself is not taxable.
If you believe that taxing the uber wealthy on transactions that are neither earnings nor capital gains to shore up social security then why not tax everyone on home equity loans? That is where the scale is.
Of course you would be opposed.
Tax on thee not on me!
ideamotor | 16 hours ago
No shit. This is stupid.
resuwreckoning | 17 hours ago
Also why can’t it be means tested? I’ve never understood that. I get people will find a way around it (quit their jobs or whatever) but it’s even worse for someone to be making 6-7 figures in general/investment/dividend income AND getting max social security.
Comfortable_City1892 | 10 hours ago
Fuck that! No means testing. Someone who invested in retirement should not be punished. No cap on the income taxed and a cap on the payout is the fairest way.
resuwreckoning | 6 hours ago
Well we’ve got to do something because right now you have a payroll tax cap AND it’s not means tested, so rich people have the best of both worlds.
StrebLab | 9 hours ago
Terrible idea. The people who really make enough to be means tested out of social security are such a small part of the expense for the program, that it would be a drop in the bucket for saving costs and immediately make social security extremely unpopular by turning it into effectively a welfare program.
resuwreckoning | 8 hours ago
You didn’t answer my question - you simply said it’s politically mean.
StrebLab | 6 hours ago
Did you respond to the wrong person? I said means testing would make the program very unpopular for effectively rounding error worth of savings. If you can't make the connection, that is a bad idea if we want the program to still exist. I don't really care if it is politically mean or not, it's just a dumb idea.
resuwreckoning | 6 hours ago
Why is that a dumb suggestion? You’re coming in hot but haven’t quite explained why - I think you think calling people dumb just wins the argument. It doesn’t.
It makes sense to me that it should be means tested - plenty of things are. It actually seems the opposite of politically unfeasible - people would quite obviously understand why we are doing that.
The idea that someone who is making 10 million dollars on investment income should also receive retirement income from an increasingly bankrupt government while other people get less doesn’t seem dumb to me. Saying Elon musk shouldn’t get social security seems logical.
StrebLab | 6 hours ago
I am calling the argument dumb, not you. I don't know you. "Rich" people pay far more into social security than they ever get out, which makes sense because the program is incredibly progressive. Practically that makes sense because the program couldn't exist without higher earners subsidizing the lower earners.
The reason the argument is dumb is because you have to consider both the potential benefits and potential costs. In this case the potential benefit is incredibly small. There just aren't that many people in the grand scheme of things who make that much money. The amount the social security program is spending on their benefits is effectively zero, so the savings are also effectively zero if you cut them out. Now what is the cost? The cost is that you take social security, which is currently highly popular, and risk making it significantly unpopular with a large segment of the population. You are fundamentally restructuring the program from an insurance program into a "wealth redistribution welfare" program. This is going to make it instantly unpopular with basically the Republican half of the country. Now we have lots of political willpower to neuter or kill the program.
That is a high cost for such a meaningless benefit.
resuwreckoning | 6 hours ago
I mean you’re calling something dumb without explaining why and still assuming that wins the day. Stop doing that and being a peak redditor ffs.
Practically there is no social program and you’re teetering on the verge of civil dissent and revolution if it’s shown that we’re unable to pay the poorer folks who also put into the system because we just have to give the Musks of the world their extra 100K per year in retirement and veer towards bankruptcy. Which we pay for with inflation which makes the smaller amount paid out to the average Joe 25 years from now unable to keep up with costs of living and the middle class person also unable to do so, but without any safety net.
It’s equally “dumb” to not understand that, correct? Even if we take your assertion at face value, that “this will do nothing since it’s a rounding error” (I’m not sure it is, but whatever), the idea that doing nothing to avoid “being considered a welfare program” pales in comparison to “future rioting in the streets because we simply couldn’t conceive of not paying billionaires social security, and didn’t understand the optics of that.”
StrebLab | 6 hours ago
You don't even know how much money this terrible idea would save and you are still arguing that it's a good idea? Ffs... I tried
NiceGuy737 | 17 hours ago
Social security was designed as a pay-as-you-go-system. Current workers paying for current recipients. The "trust fund" exists because boomers contributions exceeded what was needed at the time.
"Between 1984 and 2009, Social Security ran significant cash surpluses (excluding interest). Such surpluses were primarily the result of program reforms enacted in 1983. Those reforms slowly raised the retirement age and increased payroll taxes, which produced substantial trust fund reserves during the 1990s and early 2000s."
I'm a younger boomer born in 1960, finished undergrad in 1983. The reforms increased what we paid during our careers and delayed our full retirement age by 2 years.
https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-social-security-work/
C4Aries | 14 hours ago
If you wanna be mad look into railroad retirement and how much better (and solvent) it is. Should be this way for everyone.
brownieandSparky23 | 17 hours ago
No what about ppl who work retail
side__swipe | 18 hours ago
Or just cut benefits for the wealthy and raise the age.
momentimori | 17 hours ago
Copy the UK and abolish the cap on social security contributions. It is paid through taxation rather than the facade of there being a trust fund.
grandmawaffles | 14 hours ago
We’re in this mess because we only rely on wage for tax not investments. You can’t keep stealing people’s wages when asset owners are the problem
Snoo23533 | 18 hours ago
Lets the olds starve or rot in jail if they arent willing to work. Theyd do it to us.
oldbastardbob | 16 hours ago
I have this theory that markets are concentrating wealth at the top, and conservative policy has restricted one of the main redistribution methods, progressive tax rates, so we have a problem that is unsustainable and will be marked by continuous inflation and increasing bankruptcy and poverty.
So, y'all experts need to tell me if I'm right or wrong abut my thinking.
CapJackONeill | 16 hours ago
Yes? Like, we all know, it's a major societal problem, you didn't theorize anything
PeachScary413 | 12 hours ago
You are currently seeing in France what eventually happens, pressure needs to be released somewhere.
21plankton | 14 hours ago
I think you are correct.
LuckyPlaze | 10 hours ago
That’s been going on since Reagan. It’s the main problem.
s to the article, it is worth pointing out that they don’t own more things, the things they already owned are worth more. They will also suffer the worst in a market crash as those things are devalued the most.
PalatinusG1 | 15 hours ago
Well yes unbridled capitalism will always result in a few people owning everything. See the game monopoly as an example.
Fearless-Cattle-9698 | 8 hours ago
Yep this. Those of us with real world wealth also understand how investment compounds
Instead of saying boomers, it’s really just anyone that has a portfolio. My portfolio grew 50% in 18 months and I did nothing. This is simply a result of fiscal policy, tax policy, that favors capital over labor
cwdawg15 | 5 hours ago
You’re not wrong, but this misses the point for how the data should be analyzed.
The data from the article is accurate, too.
It is spotting out a problem where the youngest generation is not able to afford life to properly start a portfolio, while those who already own homes from cheaper times and has previous savings already is making large amounts of money from the stock market.
This is a real problem, too. Those heavy stock gains are coming from consumer spending, which includes the younger generation having to spend more and being unable to save.
One thing I would highlight as one small, but critical example, is the impacts of NIMBY-ism on local zoning and its impacts on building cheaper housing.
In the 70’s-90’s Boomers were a large cohort that had more political control, due to their large numbers by percentage of the population, and suburban growth of low-cost starter homes was common, easy to come by, and cheaper for developers.
Now that they have settled and moved on, they are often blocking development of what used to be called “starter homes,” except in more confined urban areas where land has more expensive property values and more costs to development.
This is one example for how one generation protected their own interest that varied with their age, but they aren’t helping much with the needs of the new generation.
Fearless-Cattle-9698 | 4 hours ago
I’m not convinced
My point isn’t that boomers didn’t gain large wealth. My point is it’s more of a K shaped divide between people with assets and people without
You don’t think there are plenty of boomers without networth and plenty of millennials (like myself) who does have some networth?
All the silicone valley FAANG high earners are relative young. These people all have huge networth thanks to RSU
cwdawg15 | 4 hours ago
But the problem is you’re not taking data from multiple sources and realizing they’re both true.
You need to analyze why the aggregate data is showing why one group is going up and one group is going down. That’s very telling.
It doesn’t show that there aren’t rich millennials/Genz (although I think the article was primarily about younger millennials and genz) and there aren’t poor boomers, but it does show the differences are so large that one generation is losing wealth, while one gains.
You can’t ignore aggregate data from a group, because there is a distribution range.
Do that and you’ll always be able to use relatively few individuals as an excuse to ignore real macroeconomic data.
Fearless-Cattle-9698 | 4 hours ago
What are you talking about? By aggregating data you are the one cherry picking it
I’m saying people with stocks grew disproportionately, disregarding boomer or not. I’m not saying boomer didn’t gain more. Because by definition people who are closer to retirement are going to have more assets
In fact when you lump the dirt broke poor boomers with rich boomers and lump the wealthy millennials with the middle class you are incorrectly labeling them.
cwdawg15 | 2 hours ago
Choosing to look atacroeconomic data that says one group got richer and one group got less money over a fixed period of time is not cherry-picking data.
Choosing to only look at those rich from the poorer group and inly looking at those poorer from the richer group is cherry-picking data!
Minimum_Raccoon_1501 | 6 hours ago
Pretty sure our tax code is insanely progressive. The whole bottom half gets a tax credit.
oldbastardbob | 2 hours ago
Not like it was in the post-WW2/pre-Reaganomics days.
The zeitgeist of American government used to be those that garnered windfall profits the most from government action (defense contractors, government contractors, subsidized industries) paid a healthy chunk back in the form of taxes on profits.
Now conservatives have sold a pack of lies to the public regarding taxation and redistribution so more wealth is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.
movezig123 | 16 hours ago
Wow, you are a genius for figuring this out. Is this the kind of spicy take that r/Econonics offers?
Wise_Monkey_Sez | 12 hours ago
This isn't the problem. The problem is the billionaires.
Anyone who thinks otherwise has successfully been fooled into ignoring the real problem.
electroriverside | 12 hours ago
Boomers, immigrants, the old, the young, it doesn't matter. Buy the media, bribe the legislators, get the people enraged with each other and then leave via the back door with the serious money.
zajo_throwaway | 9 hours ago
This. Gullible people getting baited into some kind of class warfare between the young and the old, sigh.
Baby-boomers wealth isn't even a problem, and it would solve itself even if it was.
Nobody lives forever, and that particular generation is about to start dying, which leaves their inheritance for the younger folks to enjoy.
Best_Cobbler_3719 | 11 hours ago
The average age of a Billionaire in the USA is 70.
The billionaires ARE boomers. There are like 5 non-boomers on this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_Americans_by_net_worth
BilbaoBoggins | 12 hours ago
Yes but unfortunately the Old Generations keep voting for parties that won't tax them.
Serious-Reception-12 | 10 hours ago
No. Liquidating billionaires doesn’t create new housing supply, doesn’t affect the cost of goods and services. The marginal dollar of a billionaire goes to investment, not consumption. Reducing subsidies to wealthy boomers on the other hand could reduce the cost of healthcare, shelter and other labor intensive services. Take a look at the percentage of federal and state budgets that go to Medicare and social security and ask yourself if we should be foisting tens of trillions of dollar of debt on future generations to subsidize the retirement of the wealthiest generation in history.
Mundus_Vincendus | 7 hours ago
No. My landlord owns 40 houses, he’s no older than 45. The problem is wealth inequality as is, the age gap is just more working class division. Poor boomers and poor gen A are in the same boat and it’s sinking, so we really need to point the dingy at the yacht and get to the real work.
Serious-Reception-12 | 6 hours ago
Your landlord isn’t the problem. He made a rational decision to invest in a scarce resource. Marginalize the NIMBYs, build housing, and the problem is solved.
Mundus_Vincendus | 6 hours ago
Disagree. More housing won’t help if it’s gobbled up by folks with capital. Currently more vacant homes than homeless as is. Further, he did not. He inherited most of his homes, as per his cousin who he contracts to come work on my house. I met him one time, and that was at lease signing 2 years ago. He doesn’t invest or do any labor on the home, simply collects a check and outsources the labor. 🤷♂️
420everytime | 4 hours ago
So build more housing for your landlord to be undercut by competition
Wise_Monkey_Sez | 7 hours ago
The problem isn't a boomer who owns two houses. People owned a vacation home when I was a kid and it wasn't an issue.
The problem is billionaires buying up entire city blocks. Liquidating billionaires and their businesses totally would create a massive new housing supply. People are already talking about "Renting your apartment from Walmart" because companies and billionaires already own a huge portion of the real estate market.
The top 1% own 13.4% of all residential property.
> The marginal dollar of a billionaire goes to investment, not consumption.
And property is a massive investment. You seem to think of investment as purely stocks and bonds, but people invest in all sorts of things, and land is one of the oldest forms of investment. The thing about land (as opposed to stocks and bonds) is that it stays valuable even when the stock market sucks because they're not making any more land. In fact with global warming it's fair to say that there's less every year.
I could go on, but the bottom line is that when billionaire-run media tells you boomers are the problem that's standard misdirection and you're a moron if you fall for it.
The problem is billionaires. They shouldn't exist. You'll never be one. An economy with a 1,000 millionaires is better off than an economy with 1 billionaire. A economy with a million millionaires is a hell of a let better off than an economy with 1 trillionaire.
If you can't grasp this you should be on a subreddit like r/economics.
Lucky__6307 | 11 hours ago
Billionares getting richer off of assets that are inflated by the money printer that's needed to deflate the debt that's taken to fund huge welfare bills. 😲
In_der_Tat | 8 hours ago
>“Their wealth gains came from appreciating assets. There’s nothing wrong with that. But many younger households may not get the opportunity to build wealth in this way.”
Good to know the cause of the divide is acceptable to the elite. Wasn't this a problem that is metastasizing? End credit creation, i.e. loans, for the purpose of acquiring homes other than the first one and dole out seed capital to every youth coming of age financed with taxes on financial assets.
Crispydragonrider | 7 hours ago
If someone had a mortgage on their (first) home, paid it off, and kept living in that house, after the housing prices have risen, they would still gain wealth, at least on paper. In their daily life, they just keep living in their house and won't benefit more from the higher value. The higher value of their home will not become relevant until it will be sold. If they live there when they die, they will never see a penny, only the benificiaries will.
In_der_Tat | 7 hours ago
Notice that I mentioned credit creation; the reason is that when banks grant mortgage loans, in spite of the theory written in economics textbooks, they create money. When an ever-increasing amount of money chases goods in limited supply, you get inflation, more specifically asset price inflation in this case.
Of course, that is not the only cause, however, it is one among the most important. To be more accurate, the good in limited supply in question is not houses themselves, but urban land. In this light, another chief cause is competition between aspirant urban dwellers in securing a place to live in the city.
To be clear, instead of regarding asset price inflation as a given I'm drawing attention to its causes.
artisanrox | 6 hours ago
The day it becomes relevant is when massive amounts of young people will never be able to even afford a house to die in
Wealthy people live uninterrupted on an even keel due to their wealth, it's the kids that are going to have to either accept less or claw their way to any sort of workable payrate.
glxykng | 3 hours ago
In my early 30s. Have experienced 3 financial crisis, a pandemic, and the rise of fascism fueled by internet algorithms.
At what point do we take over?
jiggajawn | 3 hours ago
When we outvote them.
glxykng | 3 hours ago
When we vote.
Strange-Maize9536 | 19 hours ago
The American economy is based upon private property. All I ever read in these rants is we need to take the boomers stuff because we want stuff also
What exact legislation are you proposing get the old folks stuff ?
Interesting-Force866 | 18 hours ago
Changing zoning codes so that they don't artificially constrain the creation of housing. We have scarcity by design.
Strange-Maize9536 | 16 hours ago
Boomers are doing this? You mean real estate investors
Interesting-Force866 | 15 hours ago
My own grandmother complains about the rate of development, as if its absence wouldn't render her progeny perpetual basement dwellers. My home owning coworkers used to say that they didn't want the land around them to be turned into density housing because they didn't want to "live next to transients" (Honestly, understandable but still cold)
IronicRobotics | 15 hours ago
No, lmao. Trace the votes, and it's the homeowners. Real estate investors wish that had that clout. They simply sweep in after to take advantage of the scarcity and/or local corruption. [You can kill land speculation in its crib with an LVT, but that's a different topic.]
Zoning codes are set by local entities. Local politicians are voted in by local voters. Most local elections have terrible turnouts - and the majority of voters who do vote in local elections are homeowners. (> 60%). These homeowners vote in their self interest and force the city to keep creating onerous zoning codes. In their minds, less building = higher property values.
Bigger cities are more dynamic - Midwest cities and Austin having good results by promoting construction. Though most cities are captured by some sort of anti-building coalition.
Shantomette | 18 hours ago
Total bullshit. Gen Z is the best off of any generation in US history. https://fortune.com/2026/09/22/gen-z-wealth-income-vs-boomers-millennials-richest-generation-great-expectations/
floopglunk | 18 hours ago
I think this argument confuses having a higher income with actually being better off economically. Gen Z might earn more in inflation-adjusted terms than previous generations did at the same age, but that doesn't automatically mean they have greater financial security or the same opportunities to build wealth.
The biggest example is housing. Home prices have risen significantly faster than incomes over the past several decades. Even if you're earning more than your parents did at your age, that doesn't mean much when buying a home requires a substantially larger share of your income. And housing isn't just another consumer expense. For previous generations, homeownership was one of the primary ways ordinary Americans accumulated wealth.
There's also a difference between average wealth and the financial circumstances of the typical person. A generation can appear wealthier on paper because of gains concentrated among higher-income households, while people without significant assets struggle to get ahead. That's especially important when comparing younger generations with older ones who benefited from decades of rising property values.
I also think it's misleading to use general inflation-adjusted income as the definitive measure of economic well-being. Inflation doesn't affect every expense equally. Housing, healthcare, and higher education can become less affordable relative to income even while purchasing power improves in other areas. Being able to afford a better television or smartphone doesn't necessarily compensate for having a harder time affording a house.
None of this means Gen Z is worse off in every respect. There have been genuine improvements in living standards, wages, tech, etc. But saying they're the "most well-off generation in US history" based primarily on income and aggregate wealth ignores some pretty significant structural disadvantages.
DeathMetal007 | 16 hours ago
Housing is not as great of wealth generator as stocks and bonds. A typical allocation for a 401k or pension would net more wealth overall if extra housing dollars were put into a fund for generating wealth. Plus, homes now are way better to live in than the ones boomers had so even a smaller home is a better home.
Z3r0sama2017 | 13 hours ago
I can live in a home, I can't live in stocks and bonds.
If and when the tech bubble pops, I still have a home, otoh my share value crashes and my wealth goes negative.
weatherwar | 4 hours ago
If your wealth goes negative while investing you were gambling, not investing.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 13 hours ago
Of course you can.
You do this thing called selling those assets and then use the income to pay for housing.
Next week - why two and two equals four.
Z3r0sama2017 | 13 hours ago
Depends when you bought in. Most regular investors won't have bought in at the floor, they will have bought in when stocks were already overvalued, so when it crashes they are eating the loss to their networth.
Sure they can sell, but they may have just seen 10-20 years of hard work flushed down the crapper.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 12 hours ago
Most regular investors abide by the pay-as-you-go mentality, where consistent contributions control for fluctuations in the market.
Those who try to “time the market” are the ones who most often miss out on the broader gains.
In short, don’t try to time the market.
Z3r0sama2017 | 12 hours ago
Aye, but when they see tech stocks skyrocketing every quarter FOMO will always rear it's head.
Bibidiboo | 15 hours ago
Yeah stocks are great now with a bubble that could pop at any moment, no risk at all
Prestigious_Load1699 | 13 hours ago
Ironic to hear economic ignorance in an economics sub.
Dont-know-you | 8 hours ago
Housing cost is part of the inflation.
Shantomette | 18 hours ago
AI response slop.
tommyboy372 | 17 hours ago
Gen Z expects a salary of 600k to feel successful, I don't know if that's an exaggeration or they are completely deluded by capitalism.
_tolm_ | 9 hours ago
I mean, to feel properly well off you probably do need a salary in the few hundred thousand dollars range - especially if you’re raising a family in an expensive area.
Doesn’t mean everyone gets to have that, of course.
420everytime | 4 hours ago
It’s more of a thing that boomers got cheap homes and cheap interest rates, Gen X got cheap homes with high interest rate, millennials got expensive homes with low interest rates, but Gen Z has both high prices and high rates
Skidmark_Shark | 16 hours ago
It’s going to turn out they were being optimistic.
think_long | 14 hours ago
What has inflated the most is the expectations for quality of life. That has just exploded.
weatherwar | 4 hours ago
Exactly. The problem is that QOL naturally has to plateau, but everyone thinks their life and comfort should be twice that of the previous generations.
stlc8tr | 18 hours ago
Good catch. Both articles are written by the same author! "Gen Z is actually richer than any generation before them — but they have the curse of Great Expectations" and then three weeks later, "The wealthy boomer problem is metastasizing—they got 38% richer over the last 3 years as Gen Z and millennials under 35 got wiped out"
Massive-Grocery7152 | 16 hours ago
This is sooooooo stupid, wtf did you really share this lmao?
It doesn’t take into account inflation at all?!!!!! You think rent and food or a car costs the same as it did for Gen X or boomers at our age now? LOL
I_have_to_go | 15 hours ago
It s in constant dollars, of course it takes into consideration inflation.
Read the article
tribriguy | 9 hours ago
Buddy, inflation was way higher in the 70s into the 80s. And have you taken even one single moment to observe the long period where mortgage rates were 8, 10, and as much as 15% over the 70s-90s. Stop thinking current generations have some sort of monopoly on financial challenges. They are perhaps different, but they aren’t mor or less.
IrateBarnacle | 9 hours ago
Dollar was much stronger back then, that’s the biggest difference.
tribriguy | 9 hours ago
You just walked right past the point. The dollar was losing purchasing power at a substantially faster rate during the 1970s and early 1980s than it has in recent years. Inflation exceeded 10% annually in multiple years, and mortgage rates eventually topped 18%.
Of course a dollar bought more in 1980. Nominal wages were also dramatically lower. That’s why economists adjust for inflation and compare real incomes, prices, and financing costs.
Every generation has faced different economic conditions and affordability challenges. You can’t establish that today’s are uniquely worse by ignoring the economic conditions previous generations actually experienced.
But I’m giving you huge thumbs up for the orange cat profile avatar!
KennyShowers | 8 hours ago
Except the actual day-to-day cost of real things has blown way past actual literal technical inflation.
Just a quick google turned up that the average car in 1975 was $4,750.00, that’s less than $28k in 2026$, but the average cost of a car in 2026 is ~50k.
Sure that’s pretty cursory halfassed internet research, but can’t imagine the real numbers are so different as to negate my point.
tribriguy | 8 hours ago
That argument requires considerably more rigor. You’re comparing average transaction prices 50 years apart without accounting for changes in vehicle size, quality, equipment, safety, performance, or the mix of vehicles consumers choose to buy. You also need to account for real income growth and the cost of comparable transportation.
Actual economic research paints a much more complicated picture. Some things have become more affordable, others less. Different generations have faced different economic challenges, and the evidence doesn’t support a sweeping conclusion that any one generation has had it categorically worse across the board.
I’m perfectly willing to examine those differences, but two prices pulled from Google establish very little and certainly don’t disprove anything I’ve said.
KennyShowers | 8 hours ago
Other countries sell cars for as little as $10k, so I’m not sure the reason cars cost 50k here comes down to unavoidable developments in automotive technology. Again yes I’m sure there’s a zillion great reasons we have to pay way more for the same shit, but those reasons don’t really ring true for people whose paychecks aren’t seeing the same increases as daily necessities.
And I’d assume car costs are probably a decent bellwether for prices, but if so much else has gotten cheaper wanna enlighten me? TVs yea that’s one, black market weed here in NYC another, outside of that I’m at a loss.
tribriguy | 7 hours ago
You’re still making broad economic conclusions from selective examples without doing the analysis.
Cars selling for $10k in other countries tells us very little without comparing specifications, regulations, taxes, market conditions, and purchasing power. And the $50k average transaction price in the US doesn’t mean that’s what basic transportation costs.
As for what’s become cheaper, consumer electronics, computing, telecommunications, clothing, and many household goods are obvious examples, particularly when accounting for quality improvements. Housing, healthcare, and education present different challenges.
But this is precisely my original point. The evidence is mixed, and affordability varies enormously by category, income, and period. Economists have spent decades studying these questions. We don’t need to substitute anecdotes and assumptions for that research.
And none of your examples contradict anything I’ve actually argued.
Aggressive_Owl_6913 | 7 hours ago
"cheaper, consumer electronics, computing"
https://www.drivevault.io/blog/hard-drive-price-surge-2026.html
HV_Commissioning | 6 hours ago
safety and emissions, primarily
Aggressive_Owl_6913 | 8 hours ago
Ignore that person. They acknowledge that, compared to the Volcker Shock, this time it's different and now some things are more affordable (stuff for rich people), while other things are more expensive (shit you need to survive).
tribriguy | 7 hours ago
You’ve managed to misrepresent both my argument and the Volcker shock. That period followed years of severe inflation, with the federal funds rate briefly exceeding 20%, mortgage rates approaching 19%, and the economy suffering a severe recession. Those were enormous economic challenges for ordinary households.
I’ve repeatedly acknowledged today’s affordability problems. But your claim that only luxuries have become cheaper while necessities have become more expensive is a sweeping generalization unsupported by any serious analysis.
If you have evidence, present it. Telling people to ignore arguments you haven’t bothered to understand adds nothing to the discussion.
All of this generational bickering is tiresome and, worse, doesn’t do anything for developing real solutions.
Aggressive_Owl_6913 | 7 hours ago
me: this time it's different and now some things are more affordable (stuff for rich people), while other things are more expensive (shit you need to survive).
you: As for what’s become cheaper, consumer electronics, computing, telecommunications, clothing, and many household goods are obvious examples, particularly when accounting for quality improvements. Housing, healthcare, and education present different challenges.
.......
we literally agree lol
tribriguy | 6 hours ago
No, we don’t. You’ve invented a class distinction I never made and haven’t established. Clothing, electronics, telecommunications, and household goods are hardly exclusive to wealthy people.
The CBO’s January 2026 study of household income from 1979 to 2022 found that inflation-adjusted income increased across every income quintile, even before accounting for taxes and transfers. The gains were unequal, certainly, but economic progress was hardly confined to the wealthy.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62300
You seem determined to conclude that younger generations have been systematically disadvantaged by older generations enjoying some sort of free ride. That’s an enormous claim, and the CBO study alone doesn’t settle the generational question either way.
Your argument relies on cherry-picking, sweeping generalizations, and assuming the conclusion you’re supposed to demonstrate. If you have serious evidence for that broader claim, present it.
Dont-know-you | 8 hours ago
Longevity of cars from 70s was not great either
tribriguy | 7 hours ago
Having owned a 1975 Cutlass Supreme and an AMC Pacer, can confirm. I’ll take a modern Civic/Corolla/Sentra over those ever day of the week.
mdthornb1 | 7 hours ago
The last brand new car I bought 2 years ago was less than 25k. Hydrid Toyota Corolla. It also has way more features and is much more reliable than what could be bought in 1975.
KennyShowers | 7 hours ago
Carolla like Adam? I'd assume if you owned a car you could spell it.
But snarky pointing out of likely typos aside, yea $50k isn't the get-in price for any car, it's an average. But fair enough does look like the entry-level price has stayed pretty close, I suppose some Keeping Up With The Jonses could factor into the discrepancy in average price.
mdthornb1 | 7 hours ago
People need to stop buying gigantic trucks to prove how big of a man they are if it will be a hardship for them.
dopechez- | 16 hours ago
Food is generally cheaper actually. Cars are also cheaper if you buy an economical car like a corolla, they get better mileage and last longer than they used to so the lifetime cost is generally lower.
KillerTittiesY2K | 15 hours ago
Rent is not cheaper, and the debt piled on to get the education that gets the job is astronomically higher.
Charkid17 | 12 hours ago
First, while it is true that the average wealth of a gen z is greater than the boomers at the same age, the median wealth of gen z is 20% less than that of boomers [1]. This shows a widening wealth inequality that the average simply cannot display.
Secondly, according to the federal reserve while in 1989 households under 40 held about 12% of wealth while today it’s about 6.6% [2] showing that as the US economy grew wealth disproportionately flowed to the top.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/make-it/2019/11/05/millennials-earn-20-percent-less-than-boomersdespite-being-better-educated.html
[2] https://eco3min.fr/en/share-of-us-wealth-by-generation/
Famous_Owl_840 | 8 hours ago
I am convinced that there are more bots and government paid propaganda campaign commenters on Reddit than actual people.
The Boomer Hate is a propaganda campaign designed to get younger folks ok with the idea of hurting the elderly.
Social Security will be cut and death panels/euthanasia will be administratively implemented. Aunt Sara, who has a nice house that was bought 40 years ago, goes on a few vacations a year, will be harmed.
Yet - the ‘Boomers’ with the true wealth won’t feel a thing. You think they rely on laughably small SS checks?
I hope you low IQ commenters and government workers/contractors realize that caring for parents will fall on your shoulders if deep cuts are made.
That being said, I’m against things like lowering property taxes for the elderly. It creates distortions in housing and the highest and best use of land.
If I loose my job and can’t afford my home - I must move. If an elderly person sits on real estate that has increases in value to such an extent that cannot pay the taxes on it - they must move.
No-Fan5723 | 7 hours ago
What are you smoking? Fucking crazy talk. Death Panels and Euthanasia? What kind of crazy victimization drugs are you taking? People arent pissed off about the elderly that have saved and paid off their homes. They are pissed off that the boomers have constantly and systematically removed the components of our society that let them get to that point in the first place. Boomers have consistently voted to pull up the ladders they climbed on.
Gloomy-Departure9797 | 5 hours ago
"How do I know they're bots? Well, they disagree with my opinions! Anyone who doesn't agree with me must obviously not even be a human"
I swear this sentiment predates the AI boom. Reddit used to just claim anyone who disagreed with them was a shill
Serious_Income_7020 | 6 hours ago
Bold of you to assume I’d be paying a dime out of pocket for boomer healthcare. LOL
Trawling_ | 5 hours ago
That last point as actually really contentious. It shouldn’t be, but it is. We’re voting on prop 3 on our ballots coming up in the next election.
They wanted to get rid of property taxes altogether, and are not pushing for increased homestead exemptions since that got some backlash.
Like I get having “paid your dues”, but that doesn’t really apply to local taxes that directly fund local services and infrastructure.
spawndoorsupervisor | 4 hours ago
I feel like it's part of the elite making sure the last of our social safety nets get defunded and cut. Just make a few posts on Reddit to busy subreddits daily claiming it's Boomers who benefit from them and all these fake progressives will run around screaming about how they don't want to pay for it.
These are the same people who claim to want single payer healthcare. Right. I already know they wouldn't want to pay for healthcare of those who are elderly, unemployed, etc.
Particular-Way-8669 | 2 hours ago
>I hope you low IQ commenters and government workers/contractors realize that caring for parents will fall on your shoulders if deep cuts are made.
This is already a very much a thing. Except that nowadays workers also have to provide for and compete with not just with their retired parents over goods and services shrinking number of workers create but also for increasingly more childless people on top of their parents.
demonicpixiestix | 7 hours ago
I'm not about to claim I know what bots do, or even what they're trying to do. They're definitely there, and they're definitely doing things, that's all I know for sure.
The other thing I know for sure is when people in my family born betweeb 1950 and 1965 bitch about losing money in the stock market and ask, "How am I supposed to afford the clean up for the wind damage to the large trees in my yard?" ...we'll you see, maybe if you sold one of your 4+ cars, one of your 2+ houses, or stopped taking one of your yearly trips to Europe or your twice yearly cruises, maybe it would all be fine. The shit they pull is in front of my eyes, not on a screen.
Russian bots are absolutely not causing the massive overconsumption of (generally) the boomer generation. Russian bots may be riling the resentment later generations are feeling, but I think it's a lot to point to them as one of the causes of said resentment.
Upbeat_Amount673 | 6 hours ago
There was a study done where people were given more money at the start of a monopoly game than everyone else. After they won (due to having more money) they were asked why they won and most of them said it was the way they played the game, not the massive headstart. The same thing with the boomers, they won the lotto just by being born when they were. But if you ask them they think it was all due to hard work. My grandfather who didn't graduate highschool had multiple cars, a boat, houses, RV, a plane at one point. He wasn't alone either there were a few guys at the same mill who had planes and many many men of that era were members of yacht clubs etc. Hardly anyone I know has that kind of wealth and definitely not as a non-highschool graduate mill worker.
gn63 | 5 hours ago
Bring back the unions.
Willy_Wanka840 | 7 hours ago
Felt this. Starting to get burned out on the internet because of all the fcking bots
NobodyImportant13 | 7 hours ago
Yup. Wait until they cut benefits because of the boomer hate and then start enforcing filial responsibilities laws. A lot of people probably don't even know these exist in most states.
vikicrays | 15 hours ago
ah yes, the problems in the economy and the world are the fault of boomers…
the real problem? it’s billionaires and millionaires and corporate greed. they’ve been buying up all of the single family homes for decades and rent them for 3x what they used to get, or flip them and sell for 1,000% more, or worse, turn them all into airbnbs for a never ending stream of revenue. they don’t pay tax like the rest of us do bec they get loans on what they could be worth, or have the money to “buy low and sell high” while the rest of us are struggling just to buy things like, you know, food.
they buy up entire media organizations and dictate the stories we are fed bec in reality, their goal is to divide the rest of us until we are so distracted and at each others throats, we don’t blame he real problem - them.
not only do they not pay their fair share when it comes to taxes, they don’t pay a living wage so the very people that made them rich can’t afford to buy a home or you know, eat.
meanwhile grandma and grandpa had to sell that home they worked their fingers to the bone for 50 years and struggled to pay off so they can pay for assisted living and healthcare, hoping it’s enough to survive until they die.
just a reminder that millionaires and billionaires reach the cap on social security on january 1st, while the rest of us poors pay our 12% all year long. politicians have been telling us for decades how it will go bust in 20 years, and then strike down the thought of taxing the rich or removing the cap to pay for it.
please stop believing these rage bait headlines.
StickStill9790 | 18 hours ago
That’s how age works, and why millennials are also far better off than they were ten years ago. Check out any chart on age vs. wealth and you’ll see they’re kinda synonymous.
You’d also probably be shocked to find the wealth disparity between Alpha vs. Z too. It’s absolutely criminal how much Z makes in comparison.
formerNPC | 19 hours ago
It only makes sense that the longer you work and accumulate assets like houses and other property the more money you’ll have. This is just another hit job on older people. So tired of the whiners who want everything handed to them because they don’t like the idea of actually working for something.
Shantomette | 18 hours ago
It’s also completely fake. https://fortune.com/2026/09/22/gen-z-wealth-income-vs-boomers-millennials-richest-generation-great-expectations/
future_web_dev | 18 hours ago
You forgot the /s at the end, stranger!
EmperorOfCanada | 15 hours ago
In Canada we had a PM who said over and over and over that he was going to somehow lower house prices (we have a crisis in Canada) without hurting boomer retirement savings in their houses.
We have a scrappy little socialist party where a perennial looser of a leader said the same thing. That housing prices were hurting young people and that something needed to be done, as long as it didn't hurt long term home owners (boomers).
We have a third party which is pretty much entirely boomers, and they would never harm their boomer core constituents in a million years (unless it was to help boomer oligarchs).
This is also a Canadian problem.
giraloco | 15 hours ago
Keep in mind that the top 10% of Boomer households hold roughly 67% to 71% of the generation's total net worth. So looking at total increase in wealth is meaningless because it may mean it only affects the super rich. I couldn't read the whole article because of paywall.
21plankton | 14 hours ago
I am a boomer and most certainly did not get 38% richer but maybe more boomers are entering the pool now and that increases the wealth factor. Boomers who are older and have to take RMD and live on it may make a little money but not a lot. I would suggest using median as opposed to average wealth because billionaires are older as well.
big-papito | 10 hours ago
The AI bubble popping will fix that. Just don't sit on your dicks and start buying low. Stop eating out, cancel all dumb subscriptions and tv, do whatever it takes to invest when it all craters and the boomers are destroyed.
themiracy | 10 hours ago
There is a graph that is posted periodically on Reddit and in these conversations, that shows essentially wealth by age by generation. I am having trouble finding a copy of it. But it usually makes the opposite argument - that young people are actually ahead of older people (usually with some kind of poke at Gen X at being particularly bad at this, although our wealth and population shares match right now).
Both kinds of data seem to be highlighted to stoke inter-generational conflict, which seems to be a priority of this article also.
But I guess (a) obviously certain forces, most of the time, cause the rich to become richer and the poor poorer - and there are more rich among older people, and (b) the analysis of the article seems to involve some cherry picking of the dates.
But which is it - are young people way ahead of prior generations for their age or way behind? It doesn’t seem like they can both be true.
RawrRRitchie | 9 hours ago
Excuse you speak for yourself.
I'm under 33 and I'm doing just fine. All my bills are paid. I have savings on top of a 401k.
I never stopped working during the pandemic and my job gives me 6 weeks of vacation a year.
I work for a grocery store. Will I ever become a millionaire? No probably not. But I don't need to be one. I'm getting by just fine. I have co-workers in similar situations to me and close in age as well.
My store is ALWAYS hiring because people are lazy as shit and end up quitting because they actually have to work and not just sit on their phones all shift and collect a check.
hacksoncode | 7 hours ago
The title and the explanation diverge greatly.
>Boomers help explain why the oldest group’s gains look so large. Wealthier boomers aged into the 75-and-older bracket between surveys, lifting its median.
It's important to note why this happens, which isn't necessarily people already in the "75+" bracket getting richer, but boomers entering that bracket with their existing wealth.
There are always problems with the oldest generations having the most wealth, because wealth accumulates and exponentiates over time.
There's definitely a growth in wealth of median individuals too, that is mentioned in the article, but it's half that size, and that's way more to do with the crazy stock market in the last decade with the AI bubble.
Oldschool_Poindexter | 7 hours ago
And, as is my question for most of these articles, "What about the generation between boomers and millennials? How they doin?"
"Ah, of course. My mistake. There WAS no generation between them."
Regular_Attempt_7073 | 48 minutes ago
You need money in the market to make money and we can clearly say that the older you are the more money you are likely to have.
Meanwhile cost of living going up means that younger generations have a more significant roadblock.
Distinct-Response907 | 15 minutes ago
So class warfare is now insufficient, it has to be class and age group warfare. Boomers are the problem everyone- nothing to see here with the 0.1 percent billionaires in the next age group down. Don’t worry about the boomers- the medical and long term care industries will suck up that money like nothing.
New_Breadfruit8692 | 12 hours ago
Yet another lying pointless attack on the people of an entire generation that conflates the stress of younger people with rapacious greed on the part of older people that DOES NOT EXIST!
The largest contributor to wealth is when earnings from hard work are invested early and the time value of money takes over and multiplies that. So, obviously your net worth is going to be higher at 65 or 70 than at 25 or 30.
This is how money F'ing works, and all the jealousy in the world is not going to change it, but these posts have one common thread, hatred for older people and demands that we be stripped of assets at a time in life when people are settling their affairs to hand over to younger people who will survive us.
Well I will burn my assets before leaving them to people who think they are ENTITLED to everything I worked for.
Reddit is a sewer but no other type of hate posts are tolerated quite as openly as the hate for older people. Good luck because something tells me you are never going to make it to an age where you have to decide how to allocate your assets as your life comes to a close. Because taking other people's hard earned and sacrificed for assets is even less sustainable than actually working for a wage and fighting for a fair wage.
Etheon44 | 10 hours ago
The patrimony and net worth of millenials and genZ is going to be nowhere near close the actual one of boomers at the same age (of course, taking inflation into account).
Housing will not be a good investment in 20-30 years, once boomers start dying, because too much of the population of 1st world countries is there, with them, especially in Europe. And housing is one of the biggest problems in the current state of the 1st world, because it drains young people (that dont have help from their rich parents).
But hey, you live the life that it is time for you to live, boomers have had by far and wide the easiest time on this earth than any human has ever in humanity's history had across multiple countries and cultures, and they have left a broken world where climate change, job market and cost of living they have created is going to be suffered by others and not them.
It is really no ones fault, humans are short-sighted even when they believe the aren't.
I am happy I am neither millenial nor genZ, but I am sad how awful and entitled generations above me are when you have had the easiest fucking lives.
What you call "work all my life" is a joke, your generation has no idea what actually working is, how you can NOT learn on the job anymore as we used to do, you must know the job above and beyond to even start working on the most simplest of things
But I am losing my time, how can I expect someone so entitled to not be blind, stupid of me
3RADICATE_THEM | 19 hours ago
It's funny how articles or posts like this seem to get very limited reception, but I keep seeing all of these nonsensical propaganda posts (usually based on bad data or deliberate data massaging) on how 'Gen Z is the richest generation ever' because of certain wealth estimations by age cohort.
Of course, they never actually index the wealth valuation to costs of actual essential goods like housing.
It's funny how they NEVER want to talk about relative wealth share by generation overtime and how the boomers as a generation had a higher wealth share at averaged age of 30 than Gen X did only up until about five years ago where Gen X finally surpassed their wealth share (the average Gen Xer was at the tail end of their 40s then for reference—so almost two whole decades behind).
guachi01 | 17 hours ago
Change in real median net worth from 2019 to 2025 for select age groups:
<35: +85%
65-74: +28%
75+: +56%
You tell me which age group of these three has seen the highest % increase in real net worth.
Snoo23533 | 18 hours ago
Senior discount should be illegal
WheresTheSauce | 17 hours ago
Jesus christ how out of touch can you be?
Glide_88 | 17 hours ago
Median age of first time home buyer is 40 now, when it was 28 in the 80s. Rates are high because of inflation, but home prices aren't coming down much because boomers are buying second homes in cash. Shit is cooked asf.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 12 hours ago
Mortgage rates in the 1980s were significantly higher than they are today.
https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/historical-mortgage-rates-30-year-fixed
That’s not the issue here. It’s the skyrocketing cost of buying a house.
Glide_88 | 12 hours ago
You're just agreeing with me, the problem is that high rates isn't driving the cost of houses down. Income tax was very high from the 40s through the 70s, meaning older generations collectively didn't have much spare cash to buy second homes with in the 80s. Mortgage rates (and just about every interest rate) is tied to the fed rate, which has been rising to deal with inflation. In normal conditions, higher mortgage rates would drive home prices down, but that's not happening because we've had decades of very low income taxes and a stock market that's done very well aka rich boomers buying homes with cash since they don't have to borrow money and therefore aren't subject to high mortgage rates.
This has artificially propped up the price of houses and driven up the median age of first time homebuyers since unlike boomers they have to finance their homes.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 12 hours ago
I am largely in agreement with you and appreciate your informed perspective.
The cost-prohibitive nature of housing is a major concern for younger Americans!
willcritchlow23 | 13 hours ago
I would ask if people are mistaking Gen-X’s for boomers?
The boomers are old!
Most CEO’s, political leaders, business leaders are under 62 these days.
That’s not boomer territory these days.
privac33 | 12 hours ago
You mean the people that have had the longest amount of time in their careers, bought homes 30-40 years ago that have appreciated over time, saved up for retirement and let it compound in the market and have been collecting social security have more wealth than those just starting or are only midway through their careers? In other news, the sky is blue and basic math is still mathing.
As others have stated, this is all generational and class warfare propaganda to get you distracted from the oligarchs and ruling class. Don’t buy it.
Frequently_Amused | 11 hours ago
It isn’t as big a problem as it seems. I’ve been attending funerals for them at a record pace. There will be much to inherit. Too bad they won’t know how to manage it. 🤷♂️
beefer | 3 hours ago
Phrasing is a bit ambiguous, have boomers as a whole gotten 380% richer or have the wealthy boomers done so? I know plenty of boomers who are financially comfortable from a lifetime of work and investments but they sure haven't almost quadrupled their wealth in 3 years. Think conflating the boomer upper crust with all boomers is disingenuous.
Acceptable-Peace-69 | 57 minutes ago
50% of retirees rely on social security for at least 50% of their income. Yes, some have expensive homes because they bought them decades ago, but they can’t afford to move either because homes are expensive.
Vycaus | 18 hours ago
Wtf is this "Millienials got wiped out" bs? My wife and I have increased our income by nearly 100k over the last three years. We are absolutely killing it. I'll be vastly more wealthy than 90% of boomers life savings by the time I'm 50.
We are not all broke retail workers. Millions and millions of us are well compensated wormong professionals. We basically all went college and everyone keeps telling us we're the smartest generation in human history, you'd think we'd get a little credit in navigating these catastrophies we keeping having. Getting pretty good at them by this point.
ARandomWalkInSpace | 18 hours ago
Do you not understand averages?