Covid was a wealth transfer from the youth to the elderly
Maybe all of this is a little bit of ageism, but we see that on the opposite end if the age spectrum too and I guess moving to a competency based test isn't practical.
Dont forget the US Supreme court where you literally cling to your job till you die. Those judges are one of the most selfish and egoistic people on earth.
> In 2002, then-President Jiang Zemin tried to clear the ranks at the top of the party by instituting retirement age limits: 68 for top leaders and 65 for senior level officials. That rule has been followed with varying degrees of success. Mr Jiang himself delayed his own retirement. He stayed on as the chairman of China's military for two years until 2004 after relinquishing his other positions to his successor, Hu Jintao.
NOMINATION age between is 58-67. Lower for deputy / provincial levels. Provincial leaders has to retire by 60-65. National leaders have no formal retirement age, but are expected to retire at 70-75. There's also other norms like "seven up, eight down" for standing committee. Xi hasn't broken any age limit rules / norms so far, despite heavy speculation (Qang Qishan in 2017). I would say age limit is treated also sacricant vs term limits, which doesn't even apply to the most important positions for ruling PRC in case of Xi - general secretary, chairman of PLA. There's no good reason for west to throw conniptions over Xi being a dictator for life for another 5-7 years.
We also locked up an entire generation of zoomers in a house for two years. I was all for lockdowns in early COVID since we didn't know what we were dealing with, but we kept schools closed for far, far too long.
The unfair property taxes in California and similar states is certainly wealth transfer though, which got vastly more unfair.
Central bank balance sheet coupled with debt monetization debases fiat. That means if I worked for an hour and made $10 and your house goes up by 30%, I can buy less house while you can borrow against your house at low interest rates to buy more financial assets or even my time.
From what I understand California has some of the lowest property taxes in the country and Prop 13 let owners lock in their tax basis for life.
In reality it's a little bit more complicated since the financing cost of the house has to be considered (principal + interest over the lifetime of the loan), instead of the notional value of the house (and refinancing throws another wrench into the equation).
But as a first order approximation, if houses got more expensive in labor-hours then that's a transfer from labor to capital (and a "hidden" tax on anyone holding USD).
Yes, labor is how wealth is produced, but in a sense, an individual's labor is more than that: a person's unrealized wealth is the discounted future value of their lifetime income minus necessary survival expenses. That's not a constant number - it depends on the individual's choices, but nevertheless, that is some number. And that number has some associated optionality.
If we increase the price of houses, the optionality associated with that future stream of earnings decreases, and therefore I believe that wealth has actually been transferred (since the optionality of the homeowner increases)
Economics is the study of scarcity. Wealth is real stuff like the house.
"Unrealized wealth" or "The potential to create wealth" or "the future value of your skills" shifts around, sure. Not the same thing as actual wealth though. And these shifts of theoretical outcomes are not transfers of wealth. This sounds like straining to fit something to emotional language.
...as Marx made, yes. And he was a pretty sharp cookie, so maybe the argument is correct.
> Inflation has eaten into real wages even with increases.
Interestingly not true for homeowners because of fixed-rate mortgages. Or people not currently purchasing a car.
Overall, if you have a big house, country cottages, and lots of investments, you got a lot richer in the last couple years. If you live in a small apartment and work a low skill job, you have to keep doing that, for way less pay after inflation, have to find a way to look after your kids at home, and can't go outside except to work, because "we're all in this together"
The whole episode has been a serious step back in human equality
There are legit shortages driving inflation in big categories, but wages are up too. Average wages in non-supervisory roles are up over 10% compared to two years ago, restaurant roles nearly 14%.
Inflation directly hurts people with lots of savings in low yield accounts, not the working poor. That's not to say they did well compared to the rich in the pandemic, just that inflation taken as a single factor doesn't single them out.
A friend's grandmother died alone, without having seen friends or family for months, shut in her room in a care facility during 2020.
I suppose you are one of the people who would also tell us that house arrest is "not hard".
My implication though was that elderly were not "isolated from any contact with people they depend on for basic survival needs" in cases where they were put in assisted living facilities, because they provide for basic survival needs.
> I suppose you are one of the people who would also tell us that house arrest is "not hard".
Never implied that.
But if you think that most "living facilities", even when "fully staffed" are a good place to leave an older person without regular visits, I am going to disagree with you.
Let's say the opposite reaction happened and we prioritized heathy youths over vulnerable seniors. There would have been orders of magnitude more deaths by now, society would have collapsed in some places temporarily or permanently as healthcare systems break down entirely.
The wealth transfer from the youth to the elderly is nothing new, it's been pretty continuous and generally correlates with elderly population. Covid just put pressure on the whole system.
Not just some abstract "pandemic" but specific policies adopted by specific people. Don't turn it into a Hegelian providence as if no one is responsible and it's a self propagating process that would happen regardless.
- people couldn't go on vacation so they all switched to buying durable goods at the same time. (that's why supply chains don't hold up, it's a crisis of abundance not deprivation.)
- workers in some industries died (like meatpacking) or quit (like restaurants).
- we haven't built enough houses since 1970 and everyone decided to buy a house at once.
It's not because of stimulus though; making people poorer so they can't buy cars is not a good solution to cars being too expensive.
The shutdown lasted for far too long. Mock Florida all you want, but they weathered the pandemic far better than many states with strict lockdown regimes (California/New York). Consider Florida has one of (if not the) largest senior populations in the US too.
> Many countries do not have the health infrastructure the US has and have not undergone societal collapse.
What does this mean? We have universal healthcare and in my city emergency services are so overwhelmed and overworked the wait time for the past day is over an hour. You could probably rob a storefront in open daylight and get away with it right now.
The US is the highly developed country poster child for fucking up handling Covid. Other countries don't need whatever impressive health infrastructure you're alluding to because they responded better in the first place.
Finally, I don't have a horse in this race besides not letting people die, but I'd like to point out that Florida current situation looks like hot garbage to me. You couldn't pay me to go there right now.
That tells more about your healthcare system than about anything else. My city had virtually no lockdowns (but 2 weeks at the beginning until the measure became really unpopular), nobody ever cared about distancing or masking, the vaccination rates are low as hell, schools and businesses work as usual and yet here we are safe and sound. No societal collapse you promise, no mass extinction, nothing. Some people in their 80s died which is a tragedy since that had never happened before (aren't people supposed to live forever). But other than that, life as usual. What are we doing wrong?
Is it because of the vaccinated or unvaccinated people?
[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
You could also look at per county data to compare counties in Florida with counties with similar demographics in other states, or dive into the breakdowns that states give by age group.
Do all that and it will become clear that Florida's terrible delta wave outcome is because the state government largely stopped taking COVID preventative measures, and actively tried to stop local governments and businesses from doing so.
Most of the time the money is passed onto the next generation. But here's the current problem: the boomers, as a generation, have a lot of assets, specifically housing, locked up as rentals. This has caused house to shoot up (though it is not the only factor).
If the boomers die, I suspect that a large number of homes would become available at reasonable prices within the year of the death. For example, my parents own multiple rental homes (only of one of which they constructed for the express purpose of renting on a plot of land that the city thought was undevelop-able). When they die, my sister and I will sell the properties. While she lives near them, she doesn't want to manage them, and I don't since I live far away.
By allowing the boomers to live longer, these assets remain locked up. They can continue to rent seek at the expense of the generations that came after them. This means that multiple generations, particularly millennials and zoomers are screwed.