I'm going to stick my neck out and say that this is mostly where we are already.
Agree that before the boomers can pass money to their children, our corporate overlords will find a way to hoover that money into their vaults.
Don't think AI will take everyone's job and is actually orthogonal to this entire issue.
I may sound salty but I’m not. I’ve spent enough time on Reddit to know that the real nightmare is when your parents didn’t save anything and can’t still work. Then, you’re obligated to take care of them and they actively take away from both you and their grandchildren (if they didn’t outright block you from being able to have kids in the first place).
No, you very much are not.
Of course there are other permutations, since life is full of so many uncontrollable factors.
So my kids should suffer more than me, and I should suffer more than my parents?
I feel constantly conflicted, the previous generation started with way more and wasted a lot more and now we are called in to support them, affecting their grandchildren? I don't think that's ok
I’d love to see a source for that.
Please tell me you see the irony in this.
This has been happening for a while already.
And there's a reason why trust and wealth planning has becoming increasingly common.
And while I am optimistic about AI's capabilities and am by no means an AI Luddite, assuming AI will take all jobs in the near future is ludicrous.
Defacto job loss is: Your boss thinks you're replaceable with AI, and he fires you then puts the other workers implicitly responsible for your workload, _regardless of AI's capability.
Replacement job loss: AI actually does 100% of your work load.
Defacto jobloss is the insideous love child and will definitely accelerate because the "unwoke" mind virus rich people have that people are all replaceable, useless and "takers" as elon calls it. Workers will put up wiht it because they need a job under neofeudalism.
AI is being used as a scapegoat, but a lot of this is just rightsizing of headcount as I've previously mentioned on HN. Right before GPT-4 we were using COVID as that scapegoat in 2023.
This comment of course needs to be taken in the context of HN. In the wider world, we have literal tens of millions of people in the United States who are in poverty and experience daily hunger and deprivation.
[0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
EDIT since I can't reply to irish-coffee for some reason: nobody said literally starving, OP said experiencing hunger or deprivation.
Pretty big gap between literal starving and food insecurity.
This is a miscategorization imo, food is incredibly cheap compared to any American income or welfare program.
You have to drill down to "very low food security" to reach the point where someone reports having reduced their food intake, which is a 5.4% number.
Still higher than I'd like! But it's not 47 million people.
What about when you reach retirement age? Will you consider medical care, a new house, or a cruise to be siphoning off of money that presumably belongs to someone else?
The money is theirs to use as they see fit. Maybe they earned it, maybe they inherited it. It doesn’t matter. You make your own fortune in this world, and then you get to decide how to spend it.
You still need an income. You can only refinance so much, and then you’re paying off interest.
If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax. Some people are paying $1500/mo. in property tax. They need a job just to cover it.
You can’t sell the house and cash out because you need that cash to buy the next house without having a huge monthly payment.
It’s not enough to just own assets. They have to be capitalized upon in some way - having a renter, building a farm, storage, or other business with it, and so-on.
But nobody is really doing that. I think boomers thought they would get rich off the real estate and it’s not really happening. All it did was make prices out of reach for the average person.
Super wealthy are buying homes at inflated prices which is interesting and surprising but they’re largely not boomers.
Dynasties calling shots maybe, probably. But what’s new?
That depends on where you live. For example, in California we have Prop 13, which limits how much the assessed value for a home can increase without being sold.
This means that even if your house goes up 10x in value, California will only increase the assessed value for tax purposes by 2% each year.
I bought my home over 20 years ago and it is worth much more than I paid on the market. Yet the value of the property for tax purposes is only 3K more than what I paid for it in 2002.
But the solution I think should come out of the budget -- say, a municipal budget gets $100 today from property taxes, while recent homeowners pay $80 of that. If we just change the assessment rules to make it fair with long-time homeowners, then recent homeowners will pay $90, and long-timers will pay, say, $70. But budget only needs $100, not $160. So we can lower taxes at the same time as equalizing the assessment rules.
Prop 13 was passed through a statewide initiative process, because at the time the statewide politicians were never going do the right thing for retirees that managed to own a house.
Prop 13 is not necessarily a perfect solution, but since that time the politicians inside California or in other states are by and large incapable coming up with any other solutions that would benefit a larger body/group of people who own or are buying homes.
• Applies to age 61+, age 57+ surviving spouse if the person who qualified dies, unable to work due to disability, or disabled veteran with a service connected rating of 40%+.
• Disposable income must be less than 70% of median county income.
• Your assessed value for property tax purposes is the minimum of the actual accessed value and the accessed value when you qualified for the program.
• You are exempted from paying one of the statewide school levies (there are two of them) and from paying "excess levies". Generally, "excess levies" are voter approved levies.
• If your disposable income is less than 60% of the county median household income you also are exempt from regular levies on min($70000, max($50000, 0.35 V)) where V is the assessed taxable value.
• If your disposable income is less then 50% of the county median household income the exemption from regular levies is max($60000, 0.60 V).
In my county those income levels are $65k, $56k, and $46k but are updated every three years and for 2027-2029 will be $93k, $81k, $70k. For a house with a tax of $3600, the tax as you go through those levels would be about $2200, $1900, and $1000 (or maybe it was $2400, $2200, and $1000...it was a while ago that I calculated it and I'm not sure which it was). (For King County, which is where Seattle is, the levels next year will be $101k, $89k, and $76k).
Disposable income is basically all your income, even if it is not taxable, with deductions for various medical things like drugs, in-home care and assistance, Medicare and Medigap premiums, and many others.
If your disposable income goes over the 70% threshold and you lose eligibility but it comes back down after one year and you reapply you get back your original frozen assessment. You can repeat this so you could qualify and get the frozen assessment and the exemptions, then alternate years in which you take a big IRA withdrawal which pushes you over and you pay tax that year based on your actually assessment and with no exemptions, then do a year with the frozen assessment and the exemptions.
This isn't how property tax works in many places (assuming you're talking about supply/demand constraint reasons and not individual property development, e.g. apartment building). There is an overall assessment being raised by the entity (e.g., county), and it is divided pro rata across property owners. In this system, if everyone's property goes up 10x, the amount they pay individually stays exactly the same.
If the entire city goes up 10x (without corresponding general inflation), you’ll likely find the tax rate goes down because most places tax property to fund government and few places would quickly swell the city budget by 10x.
It would have if they had paid off their mortgages instead of borrowing against equity, refinancing and taking equity out, etc.
If you still owe 70-80% of your house to the bank when you retire, it's not really an asset.
You have to do something with the land even if it means improving your home, paving a road, to increase the value above and beyond the market trend - to live off of! Otherwise you’re a buyer (or borrower) again
The overall point stands though beyond that nitpick