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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

I dont think 'wishing karmic retribution' is doing anything. We have been stuck in a world created in the 60s which is not changing because too old people have too much power and wealth. It wasn't alwasy like that and the current situation is a problem for a number of generations now. Age-based inequality needs to be seen as a societal problem.

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I don't think age-based inequality makes the sense you think it does. Only a minority of older people are wealthy, imo, and mostly out of a function of the fact earning power accrues over time. But plenty of elderly people are actually homeless or forced to go back to working at Dollar General and Walmart.

It would be more accurate to target wealth inequality, which will disproportionately target the old wealthy people by nature (and also younger people who are wealthy through wealthy prior generation).

> Only a minority of older people are wealthy

Some decades are more lucky than others when it comes to the generation of wealth. That is an inequality in itself and it affects everyone not just the top

I'm arguing that it may not actually affect everyone. In america, the biggest wealth-building tools from the federal government were barred to black people in the previous generation. Banks are still getting hit with racial discrimination in mortgage lending in current year. I don't think we should address inequality by generation if only a minority of that generation got to reap the rewards. It's not like a Latina grandma alive before women were allowed to open bank accounts had a ton of options to her.

the wealth at the top is a side-effect of chronic unfair advantage. Even if that is somehow targetted, the unfair advantages like e.g. the extreme way in which housing markets in free economies evolved won't change.

And we know that wealth tax does not work because of the structure of the world financial system. We can't pretend that if we try again and again it will work.

The inequality of housing in particular is a result of generational demographic factors which led to political choices (low inflation mandate - high interest rates are being imposed on new generations to pay for housing obtained with record low interest rates). These are cases where democracy fails and cannot guarantee the fundamental right to housing (in fact it actively fights it). Bandaids cannot solve this

I agree bandaids cannot solve this. I just disagree we should be targeting a generation and not just targeting all wealthy people, because the generational opportunities you're describing were closed to subsets of people. Like I said, it's not like a Latina grandmother who wasn't allowed to open a bank is the source of the generational global wealth problem-- it's the white managerial class who got preferential federal mortgage loans.

The entirety of the baby boomer voting bloc is centered around the idea that we must do whatever is best for the wealthy, because we've thrown all of our retirement money into their stocks because of the shift from pensions to 401Ks. So it doesn't really matter how rich an individual is, you already know how they're going to react because their future livelihood depends on it.

Even my dad, who has both a 401K and a pension and Social Security and draws $70K yearly from them even though his living expenses are around $20K... he is hardcore into the idea of doing whatever makes the Dow go up, because that to him is the greatest good.

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