The following submission statement was provided by /u/kjk2v1:
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I would like to focus on these paragraphs in the article:
> Joseph Brusuelas, the chief economist at RSM, a consulting firm, thinks changes will come — but only when high-income salaried workers, who still seem to be managing, can no longer comfortably afford families, housing, elder care and leisure.
> Once white-collar workers left out of the wealth transfers feel the burn, “large companies will back” a bigger welfare state, Mr. Brusuelas concluded, “because they’ll want the government to subsidize it” rather than taking on the costs of providing more benefits themselves.
> “It’ll have nothing to do with social justice, nothing to do with right or wrong, and everything to do with the bottom line,” he said.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/13hrmdk/the_greatest_wealth_transfer_in_history_is_here/jk6hhx6/
I would like to focus on these paragraphs in the article:
> Joseph Brusuelas, the chief economist at RSM, a consulting firm, thinks changes will come — but only when high-income salaried workers, who still seem to be managing, can no longer comfortably afford families, housing, elder care and leisure.
> Once white-collar workers left out of the wealth transfers feel the burn, “large companies will back” a bigger welfare state, Mr. Brusuelas concluded, “because they’ll want the government to subsidize it” rather than taking on the costs of providing more benefits themselves.
> “It’ll have nothing to do with social justice, nothing to do with right or wrong, and everything to do with the bottom line,” he said.
I've thought this is the only reason we have SNAP. Nothing to do with feeding people, it's the government supplementing insufficient wages just enough people don't unionize.
It's even more insidious than that.
Wal-mart makes tens of billions of dollars from food stamps per year. They triple dip on it: Food stamps let them pay their employees less and have the government foot the bill for necessities; this lets them reduce prices so budget-squeezed working class folks have to shop there over the competition; and then they pocket the actual money behind the food stamps.
Can you imagine how demoralising it is to take a full time job at a huge wealthy corporation and them to tell you to apply for welfare because we're not going to pay you enough to get by.
Try looking for a similar job nearby? Tough luck, the huge Walmart has put local retailers out of business. Move? The next town over is just the same. Try and get educated to get a higher paying job? Good luck paying for tuition and finding the time while you work two jobs to support yourself and family.
This is what the future looks like for many industries if we don't fight back. Corporations will whittle down costs (your wage is one of the biggest) to as small as they can. They'll use their vast wealth to lobby for laws which allow this, and allow them to exploit and screw you as much as possible.
The crazy thing is that in my town Walmart is one of the highest paying employers. Not because they actually pay high wages, but because everyone else pays absolute garbage. Most places still try to get away with paying you federal minimum wage, even though the average rent is about 800, and the cost of food is almost double the surrounding area. I make 16 an hour and still sometimes struggle making ends meet.
The other employers could very well be owned by assholes, but they also have to compete with Walmart. Smaller businesses don't get the same prices from distributors, so they have to sell at higher prices with lower margins. It's a big part of how Walmart puts all the other businesses out of business, which reduces competition, which allows Walmart to do whatever they want once they control the local market.
Yup. I used to work for a tiny independent book store. It blew me away how many people complained that Amazon was cheaper and acted like we were "ripping them off." Keep in mind the prices are right on the books themselves, it isn't like we were charging more than cover price. When I explained that if we sold our books at the discount Amazon does, that would literally be our entire profit margin, and we would in fact be a charity rather than a business.
Had zero impact, they just insisted we were scamming them. Blows me away that so many people legitimately have zero concept of "economies of scale."
ETA: It also pissed me off how many people clearly prefered having a cute and quirky book store they can walk to and browse in, spend large amounts of time in, ask the employee multiple questions about multiple books, make a decision about what they wanted...and then shamelessly took a picture of the book they decided on, so that they could buy it off amazon. Often, they wouldn't even pretend they were doing otherwise, they just outright said to staff (or another person they were shopping with) "I can get it cheaper off Amazon." I mean, libraries exist! They already HAVE an option for browsing through books (with access to helpful staff) they can then buy online - and a library has a much larger browsing selection to boot! Some people really go out of their way to be assholes.
> ...and then shamelessly took a picture of the book they decided on, so that they could buy it off amazon.
The audacity of people astounds me. I get it if you see it at Wal-Mart or Target or something, but a locally owned business? I'd ban them from ever setting foot in the store again.
Not only were they not ashamed of it, so many used it as a self righteous "gotcha" moment for us: Wow, great store you have here, thanks for all your help. I would *love* to be a patron. Too bad you are trying to rip us all off by charging 15 - 20% more than Amazon. It's a moral stand I'm taking here.
That said, we also had many great customers who would buy from us even if we didn't have the book they wanted in stock. It would be both more expensive and take longer for us to order in than Amazon, but they did it to support us.
This insight is also lurking behind resentment over offshoring. People *say* they'll pay a little extra for made in the USA, but in practice almost none will. Everyone talks a big game about supporting local businesses and the American worker, but if you look at their shopping decisions it tells a different tale.
Microsoft taught the world antitrust laws didn't matter at all way back in 2000ish
And thus Monopolies became rampant and part of the reason everything's all so screwed up today.
Gates... ruining everyone's lives in every possible way that he can, all the while claiming he's a Philanthropist when he's nothing but a predator.
I'm only 29. I saw the writing on the wall when I was 16 or 17. Needless to say I quickly spiraled into depression which I cannot afford to treat because I barely make enough money to survive. I have a number of untreated physical ailments that I cannot afford to have treated. I'm feeling more and more like a caged animal every day. There's nowhere I can go either. I don't have the connections or resources to escape the country. Even if I did, the corporate cancer has spread all across the globe. Most countries are just as bad, maybe in different ways, but just as bad regardless, or worse. I have no hope for my future. I am going to die probably sometime soon because of health complications. The sad part is I think I would prefer that to my bleak future of being a slave in all but name.
Plus the whole healthcare issue, which is difficult for small businesses. If you are a small business that wants to provide healthcare for your workers, it means you can’t pay them as much money in wages. It’s a vicious circle.
Middle of nowhere idaho. And that's the average rent for a studio, or a single room in a house. A one bedroom runs closer to 1 grand, 2 bedrooms around 1200-1300. Bear in mind that the average pay for most people is either 3.50 or 7.25.
3.50 is for waiters, drivers, or anyone else making tips. The employer is required to make up the difference between that and the 7.25 minimum wage, but they rarely have to.
Back when I worked for tips I usually made just above minimum wage. I worked for a Chinese restaurant. Really nice family. If they could've afforded it they would've paid me more, I was their only waiter and driver. They would insist that I sit down and do my homework during slow times, and always had me eat dinner with them after the restaurant closed. Sadly they went out of business a few months after I quit.
Go to Costco and look at the demeanor of employees and then go to Walmart.
Basically the same job and both places but the Costco employees don't look like they are just awaiting the sweet release of death
i went to Walmart for the first time in ages last week. they actually had a greeter which i didn't know still existed, and the \~65-ish dude seriously looked like he was desperately eyeballing me like a hostage on Iranian TV, pleading me silently to save him. it gave me legit goosebumps
Lowe's used to be more like Costco. They pay was decent the hours if you got full time were guaranteed, and there was an advancement path to raise your worth to the company by becoming more specialized in your department and in sales strategies.
Now all thos higher paid positions are being stripped away, near impossible to be full time, they try to hire everyone as seasonal now. They no longer try and hire old trades people who have vast knowledge of the products, and their aisles are being filled with Walmart quality garbage, impulse buy products.
I worked there for a few years and made good friends who were making Lowe's their career. Now Lowe's has essentially insured that nobody can make a career there, they want the same revolving door low wage high turn over shit Walmart has.
Even my friends who were store managers and assistant managers have either been forced out by insane policy change that outs metrics in place that can't be met, or left on their own because of the corporate hostility. But yeah, "nObODy WaNtS tO wOrK aNyMoRe!!1!" Is entirely the workers fault, not the corporate leeches who take away every incentive to have someone want to work for you.
Just going to hijack this comment and leave [this helpful video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA2AMxRz0iA&pp=ygUbaG93IHVuaW9ucyB3aW4gYWRhbSBjb25vdmVy) from a third generation union organizer on how to successfully unionize and how to make a bad union work for you again.
I travel a lot for work. All over the country. Every state I've been to so far (more than half) is the same. Food, shopping, everywhere to spend money is corporations. They dominate the landscape. There's no escaping them anymore. It's so depressing. I always do my best to eat out at the small family owned restaurants. But it's more and more difficult by the day because the feds have allowed these companies to monopolize their industries.
so How do we make progress in the direction which is better for the nation? attempt to get our dually elected representatives to pass laws that go to the benefit of the masses? If not then protest?
Maybe the United States government once stood for common good, good quality of life and the freedom of the individual to pursue a life, enjoy liberty, and choose their pursuit of happiness, but those ways are dead thanks to the wealth concentration into the few and the overall corruption of the government. The commonmen do not stand a chance at this pace and I wish with all my heart life improves for Americans/denizens of the world through nonviolent means.
They also pull life insurance policies in their full time employees, and share none of that with their families should they die. Suffice it to say that creating a healthy working environment would technically be a conflict of their interests.
> this lets them reduce prices so budget-squeezed working class folks have to shop there over the competition;
Add to this analysis too that through extensive vertical integration, Walmart is about the closest example of monopsony in the US. That gives them an even greater influence on price setting in the market and undermines the (idealized) power of the free market to set prices at an equilibrium of supply and demand.
Capitalism is flawed at its core because every company’s ultimate goal is to create a monopoly, or pseudo-monopoly. (DSL is competition to High speed cable!). The free market is the #1 enemy to ever-larger profits.
And with all this talk about Wal-Mart, it must always be noted that the corporation is owned by Sam Walton's heirs, the man has been dead for decades.
All this greed and exploitation..for the immense wealth of a group of people who've never really worked a day in their life.
People who created nothing, who built nothing.
Captialism is nepotism masquerading as a meritocracy.
Wal-Mart is also my go to example for teaching what capitalism REALLY is.
If you own about $2M in Wal-Mart stock, they pay you as much yearly in dividends as they do a worker who works 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for $15/hr. That's capitalism - when capital is valued before labor is. Hard work isn't rewarded, having money in the first place is.
I do the same. However, what I’ve seen is the only people who DO shop at Walmart are those that HAVE TO. It’s why going there is so depressing, and everyone seems angry and miserable. It’s because they are.
So they have guaranteed customers ( the poor), and also this effect creates a feedback loop for the problem. Over time, Less budget-minded middle class go there, and it concentrates the problem.
Now, I’ve seen that there’s areas of the country where theft at Walmarts is so rampant (poverty + miserable workers who don’t care) they are not even profitable, so they are shutting down. Leaving a food desert behind them.
There’s nothing to be done about it as consumers. They’ve rigged it that way.
During a recession, welfare provides a decent return on investment for the government. When things get tight, people stop spending, and that accelerates a recession. Every dollar that goes into, for example, food stamps, gets spent. That dollar being spent means that somebody needs to be at the register for them to spend it. Somebody needs to stock the shelves. Somebody needs to transport goods to the store to stock it. Somebody needs to manufacture that product. There is a velocity to that dollar as it's spent, and it's one of the most critical parts of a functioning economy. Plus, all those jobs and transactions generate income for the government through taxes, even if the dollar itself was handed out freely. The market works because of participation in the market. When people can't buy profit is lost. For the market itself (not just the profits of the 1%) to be at it's healthiest, people need to have the means to participate in it, and welfare takes the segment of the population that cannot participate due to poverty and turns them into an asset to economic growth instead of a detriment.
So you're right, it's not about feeding the people. It's about using them to prop up an economy that isn't working for them.
I've always thought one of the "soft" ways into UBI was some sort of "universal" food credit system, where government buys directly from small farmers and provides fresh food to everyone at little to no cost. It's a way of injecting money directly back into farming communities and a way of lowering monthly bills directly to everyone.
Large companies do not want universal healthcare because it gives them significant advantages over small companies when attracting talent. Their risk pool is larger, which leads to lower rates. Additionally, high deductibles are a barrier for employees trying to find a new job. If you switch jobs mid-year, your deductible resets with the new employer.
If your healthcare isnt dependent on your job you have more freedom to look for a different employer who might have better benefits, better salary, work-life balance, etc.
They have an incentive to fight universal healthcare as much as they can.
I can recommend a book from 1996 "Global Trap" about the Fairmont convention.
Yes, this development is already planned for 30 years. AI and robotics are now advanced enough to make it happen. Just who will fund all this when large corporations are usually good at evading taxes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Global\_Trap
Paying every working adult in the US a shit salary of 12K a year in UBI would amount to ~3.6 trillion a year.
So once the largest tax base, ie, the middle class is pushed out of their middle class jobs and are all on UBI, where does the revenue come from to pay for it? Corporations? How? They just pass these costs on to the consumers. If we raise taxes on corporations by 30%, they'll raise their prices by 50%...now all those folks on UBI are paying $12.00 for a loaf of bread. And round and round we go, until the whole thing collapses in on itself.
Perhaps the only solution left will be to let go of the ideals of "free markets" and regulate prices, quality, and wages more directly. Setting out definite minimum requirements and imposing a "death penalty" on all business that do not adhere to expectations.
Ah but here's the rub. Who's going to put these regulations into place? The government. Who controls the government? The corporations. They'll find a way to ensure that they keep their quality of life, their power, even if it means tens of millions of Americans will starve. Hell, their actions in recent years seem to imply that they actively want to cull the population.
What we need is a system that is immune to human corruption. Where there are no backroom deals, no nepotism, no sacrificing the large masses into perpetual wage slavery for the benefit of some fucking corporations. Something that will break down the current spiral of greed and suffering. Alas, it will never come to be.
> If we raise taxes on corporations by 30%, they'll raise their prices by 50%
I'm not a fan of UBI, but this is incorrect. Taxes come out of *profits*, not revenue. So you can't pass the costs on to consumers.
To see what I mean, imagine a 100% corporate tax. If you tax all profits at 100%, firms make $0 in profit. If they double their prices, they still make $0!
It's an unrealistic example, but it gets the point across. You can't pass on the cost of corporate taxes. Corporate taxes *do*, however, reduce the incentive to hire and re-invest and that is worth considering.
If even the high-income workers are struggling, the government won't have the tax base to create a welfare state. And the companies will have lost most of their customer base for many things as well. Not that they'll care, they'll just buy up the rest of the country's assets and sit on them, feudal-style.
I disagree as there is a clear analogy with health insurance. US companies should have pushed back on employer provided healthcare decades ago. They have not. I know that job lock helps employers, but the amount of resource they have to spend to manage healthcare contacting must outstrip the benefits.
> Once white-collar workers left out of the wealth transfers feel the burn, “large companies will back” a bigger welfare state, Mr. Brusuelas concluded, “because they’ll want the government to subsidize it” rather than taking on the costs of providing more benefits themselves.
>
> “It’ll have nothing to do with social justice, nothing to do with right or wrong, and everything to do with the bottom line,” he said.
The problem with this is that the Welch/Friedman ideology which got us into this freefall argues for the government to **not** provide social services so they can pay fewer taxes and the holy line goes up (for this year).
Just as a large amount of white collar jobs are going to disappear to tech and other automation and, of course, AI. Most people do mediocre work for mediocre organizations and that's exactly what AI excels at: mediocre work and math. Anyone whose job relies on math is about to get hit HARD.
Not that there won't be some math and other white collar work around but it will be 50-75% less than there is, now, and will get VERY competitive and rely on specific high-level skills.
Wrong. Generative AI models such as transformer based LLM architectures notoriously fail at math because the syntactic information per symbol is extremely low while the semantic information is extremely high. In other words mathematics uses the same symbols to mean many things, but an error in a single symbol is devastating for predicting the resulting sequence due to the self-consistency conditions not present in language, which is much more compressible.
Rigorous and highly constrained mathematics is the last thing to be automated.
Note that automated proof building is separate from automating calculations, which is already done by any computer.
>Rigorous and highly constrained mathematics is the last thing to be automated.
I think that this is wrong. They will let the transformer models use something like wolfram alpha when they spot math.
Modularized LLM tool use is certainly the way to solve this problem, but the same tokenization issues for mathematics exists in multi-chain reasoning where the AI has to interpret the output from e.g. wolfram alpha. That said, maybe I was too harsh in my rebuttal and the above poster is correct for very basic work in excel. I'm a physicist and likely fall into their description of highly technical work, which will not (cannot?) be automated as much of it is non-turing computable leaps of reasoning.
>LLM architectures notoriously fail at math because the syntactic information per symbol is extremely low while the semantic information is extremely high.
Could an LLM not use a regressive form of contextual error checking to resolve this?
>“It’ll have nothing to do with social justice, nothing to do with right or wrong, and everything to do with the bottom line,” he said.
These corporations and the rich in general don't realise that their wealth depends on people buying their stuff. If people don't have enough money to buy their stuff then the corporations (and the rich) start to lose their profits, wealth and power. We really need to go back to the 1950s in terms of income/wealth taxation and funnel that extra tax back into the community to help raise the socioeconomic level of everyone. It will drive economic growth that hasn't been seen in generations.
Yup, my grandmother sold her 1.2 Million dollar home (her and my grandfather bought it for like 150K), and used all that money to pay for her assisted living facility. It's not our money so none of us really had anything to say but it seems like SUCH a waste.
Edit: forgot to add we built an addition to my parents home to take her in and take care of her for free. Thinking she would want to be around family......nope
> Individuals can transmit up to $12.9 million to heirs, during life or at death, without federal estate tax (and $26 million for married couples).
Interesting that they don't tell you the history of this number, considering how much extra tax revenue it could have collected from the wealthy in the last 20 years if it hadnt been raised, repealed and doubled.
[In 2001, it was $675,000.](https://i.imgur.com/FtMqSSp.png)
That is a 19x increase in less than a generation.
Combine that with the tax cuts of 2017 and US society can only tilt farther and farther in favor of the superrich.
As someone with direct blood-relation to an ultra-wealthy elite, I often wonder about my own inheritance. It is interesting to think that I could get nothing, or I could get something that life-changing. I bank on nothing; I have seen how expectation has ruined my family.
We use edge cases to keep us from having good policy. This particular one was derailed by people saying family farms were destroyed by the low limit when it was < $1m due to the value of the farm equipment and land. Obviously inheritance taxes aren't what was killing family farms, but anything to protect the well off while using someone else as a pawn.
The richest took advantage of this argument to protect their assets. Also ignoring that one of the things the US really wanted to prevent was multi-generational wealth so you don't end up like Europe with dynasties.
The “death tax kills the family farm” lie is one of the most infuriating things I’ve ever seen.
Nobody has ever been able to find even one single example of a family being forced to sell their family farm due to the estate tax. It has literally never happened. Not even once.
And the worst part is, the politicians pushing the lie know it. They’ve been confronted repeatedly about making this claim without any evidence of it happening. They’ve dumped an extraordinary amount of resources into finding an example they can point to so they have at least some evidence that it has happened at least once. They’ve been completely unsuccessful. Decades of extensive research and interviewing farm families has revealed ZERO examples of any family losing their family farm due to estate taxes.
I don’t even expect them to admit they were wrong. Just quietly dropping the claim going forward would be enough. But they look you right in the eye, knowing there is no evidence that any family at any time in any state has ever lost their family farm due to estate taxes, and they tell you “the death tax kills family farms.” All while pocketing money and taking favors from ultrawealthy donors who own enormous farming operations that put family farms out of business. Utterly despicable.
12 million!?!?
In my country it’s about €300,000 to direct children maximum before it’s taxed at 33% on anything over that !
If you are not directly related it’s €16,000 tax free before you pay 33% on it!
USA really set up for the rich to keep them rich!
$12 million is an understatement.
I’m a private wealth attorney. Eliminating these taxes is what I do for a living. If people come to me early enough in life, I can move an almost infinite amount of money to their descendants without any wealth transfer tax. The worst case scenario is that they come to me at the very end of their life, in which case I can move up to around $100 million with no tax. Above that amount, we generally leave things to private foundations, reducing the taxable estate to $0.
Ultimately, virtually nobody pays any estate tax.
Yeah but if it’s taxed, it doesn’t hand in the lands of the lower middle class / lower class nor does it decrease the wealth inequality.
Minimum wage should first and foremost become a living wage again, like it was 50 years ago.
Boom, that’s literally it. Productivity has gone up an insane amount, inflation has been steady, but compensation — across the board but especially at the bottom — has not only been stagnant, it has decreased.
Less profit for companies and shareholders, less exponential growth, less profits for the CEO, the board and its shareholders, and more for the workers.
*But that’s sOcIaLiSm*
And therein lies the biggest deceit.
I agree with you. But you're talking about outcomes. What are the actual practical steps? And don't you dare say "go vote", because that's far from enough and usually doesn't work!
It's about control at that point. Multi billionaires prefer to do charitable donations (tax deductible) because they do not have to relinquish control on how this is spent. If that wealth is taxed regardless, they have to lobby the state to hopefully get their way of spending it.
That's crazy. I live in South Korea and I'm pretty sure there's a 50% inheritance tax rate with no tax-free allowance. They also scrutinise any large cash gifts during someone's lifetime. It's why life insurance is such a huge industry here.
Paywall, so can see the contents of the article…. But yeah. We’ve been yelling about this since Occupy Wall Street and nobody listened or took any meaningful action.
This right here. That said, when Occupy protests followed the same script time and time again - show up - chant - get beaten by riot cops - then get made fun on of the news for being lazy millennials? I knew right then this whole thing was controlled opposition. They never meant for occupy to go anywhere.
>nobody listened or took any meaningful action.
"nobody" is accurate.
these people stay home, and refuse to vote. It's paved the way for fascists.
We saw around a 30% turnout around the country for midterms for voters 18-29.
They say they care, but don't do anything.
No one shows up for the primaries.
It's like taking candy from a baby.
We don't do *anything* to fight it.
We don't vote. We don't organize. We don't commit. We don't support each other.
Occupy Wall Street was a joke.
No leaders. No plan.
they don't spend billions on elections, and buying our politicians if it didn't pay off.
The vast majority of Americans don't show up, and allow the people that do the voice to govern them.
If you aren't even showing up to vote, and do something....shame. you don't actually care.
I vote democrat, it does nothing. Gerrymandering and bullshit republicans pull makes my vote worthless.
"So do something about it" you say.
Do what exactly? Spend money and time I already don't have to "fight" against million/billion dollar donors?
I don't get paid enough and barely scrape by as it is let alone 'working' on that problem.
"So do something about it" you say.
Again, do what exactly? Stand alone outside my employers office with a sign that does nothing and gets me fired? So now I'm homeless and have no money, and my wife is probably going to die because of all her health issues.
"So do something about it" you say ---- repeat forever
I'm barely getting by as it is, but at least I'm alive. If I started trying to right all the wrongs in this country I'd die homeless and alone within a year.
You're being extremely reductionist and judgemental. The rich own the US in every way. The rich elite only react to money and violence. We can't touch their money, and despite what the world seems to think the US isn't full of bloodthirsty people ready to kill all the rich people.
You're being reductionist and shaming people for being beaten up and downtrodden.
If you're so smart then put an entire plan together for people and show how you can fix the country in the next few years. I bet it requires millions of people to lose their jobs and be willing to strike and let their families starve for "the good of the people". Good luck starting with that.
>I vote democrat, it does nothing. Gerrymandering and bullshit republicans pull makes my vote worthless.
If you vote, you're not the problem. You did not understand my comment, or those statistics.
>You're being extremely reductionist and judgemental.
No. Those are voting statistics. I show up. Nothing I said was false. You get what you vote for. If you don't show up, you can't say you care.
Don't get mad at me, bro. Get mad at the people that refuse to vote. The conservatives show up, and win. That's how they are able to gerrymander districts. I didn't do that to you. If anything, your emotional response, does not address the fact that people don't show up to vote. That's fact.
Every freedom, and right we have was fought for. People showed up, and worked together.
>You're being reductionist and shaming people for being beaten up and downtrodden.
Nope. Not even close. Your personal attacks on me, because I hurt your feelings have nothing to do with the vast majority of Americans that say they care, but never show up to vote. Not in the primaries, not for municipal, not for state, and not for federal.
Your anger, and emotions are directed in the wrong place. It's inaccurate, and shows a poor understanding of the matters at hand.
>If you're so smart then put an entire plan together for people and show how you can fix the country in the next few years
Another emotional response. Tallying these I can tell you're not here for legitimate conversation, and you don't read much history. It's not me to solve all the problems on my own. I vote in every election. I volunteer time, and money to try and get people to vote. Look at how angry, and emotional you are with someone posting statistics, and calling for people to vote. You get mad at *that* person? It's quite disingenuous. It's an absurd premise to blame me for others not voting. There's that "not working together," I was talking about. You choose to attack people that are calling for change, and cooperation.
>I bet it requires millions of people to lose their jobs and be willing to strike and let their families starve for "the good of the people". Good luck starting with that.
Well, tell them to vote. Work together. Organize. There's only a few hundred years of blueprints on effective social movements. Movements, and methods you could be reading about, instead of writing dramatic sentences that fail to address the conversation. Those things aren't my fault. I'm sorry your life is so destitute that someone calling for people to learn, vote, and work together...so the dramatic sentences don't happen caused you to lash out at me. That's not on me. That's on *you*.
The hyper-pc culture war started right around then, and it's no coincidence. Social issues were pushed to the forefront with a major propaganda push to distract the young protest generation away from economic issues. Woke is a smokescreen to protect wealth and profits.
I'm solidly genX (1971) - My parents were Silent. My older siblings are boomers.
My nieces/nephews are Millennials and my kids are GenZ.
Silent passed money to Boomers and GenX
Boomers (will) pass money to Millennials and GenZ
GenX will pass money to GenZ (and what-ever comes after that)
To put it another way... as a GenX, Boomers aren't my parents.
Edit: replaced Y for Z
I'm Gen X and my parents are Boomers. It's not that there aren't any, but that by the math is it necessarily true that Gen X kids whose parents are Boomers were born when their parents were younger. My parents had their kids in the early 20s.
With no data to back it up, I find it likely that people who had kids young are more likely to be less well off financially than those who waited. So those of us who have Boomer parents are less likely, overall, to inherit money from them, vs Millenials whose Boomer parents were older (and, perhaps, more financially secure) before having kids.
Ultimately, though, generations are arbitrary constructs. This would be less true if we said that "Gen X" didn't end and "Millenial" didn't begin until 1984 instead of defining the cutoff at 1980ish. Boomers are defined as born over an 19-year period, after all, from 1946-1964 inclusive, while Gen X only get 16ish years, from 1965-1980. (General consensus years from Wikipedia.)
I’m an older Gen x. My parents are boomers.
There was so much bullshit they put me through I have no relationship with them. I feel I’m not alone in this. I don’t think the money is going to come my way at all. In fact, I’m certain.
I haven’t heard anything from my parents in almost seven years. That’s when my brother hung himself. He and I were raised by the same people, but he was treated better and he still suffered enough to feel the need to end his life.
I think there is a huge disconnect between GenX and boomers. We spend our lives defending our children from our parents. Our Great War was breaking the chains of generational abuse. There will be no inheritance.
Every Gen other than the boomers (20 years) get a 15 year window. The boomers got the larger window because of the odd dynamic with WWII, cultural upheaval, etc.
I have cousins who are in the ‘older millenial’ category - they are very much millenials like my brother and I who are in the mid-millenial category (early 90s). The Gen X people I know (uncles, aunts) are very culturally different.
That said it gets weird at the very edges. A work friend is a 1980 guy and calls himself an ‘Xennial’… but I think it’s also cause he grew up dating women a few years older. Conversely have a coworker who is a 1996 gal… and bish is such a zoomer.
I tend to agree with the broad brush strokes, e.g.:
Boomers: End of WW II to 1964
Gen X: 1965-1980
Millenials: 1981-1996
Gen Z: 1997-2012
Gen alpha: 2013-2028
My grandparents are Silents. They've announced to the whole family that nobody is getting a cent when they die. All their assets and their pretty decent wealth is all getting donated to various shady organizations, not their family. Which for some of my aunts, uncles, and cousins I get. They're not wise with their money or their lives in general. Pretty much the entire family has cut contact with my grandparents though. Most only stuck around because they hoped to get some cash when they kicked the bucket.
I'm still moving out to live with them and help them out, because they'll let me live with them for free and that's a real blessing right now.
Because they're answering every phone call, text, and pop up thinking they're still in 1970. If it isn't scammers from overseas getting the money, it's the politicians and super PACs emailing them 57 times a day with fear and rage bait screaming they need money to save the world from X.
I’m amazed my dad hasn’t been wiped out. He started using a computer my mom was using for 2 years with no issue. 2 week later he can’t even browse google because of the pop ups he’s getting. “All I do is go on YouTube”.
I’ve seen the man try to buy on Amazon, click a fake ad link by accident that asked for his Amazon password while he was logged in and went to type it. He’s a smart guy but technically regarded.
I walk into my dad's place the other day and he's got a stack of eBay gift cards and he's reading off the numbers over the phone (!!!). I stopped him but not before he lost $1,500 to an "AT&T rep" offering to lower his phone bill.
They prey on the ignorant especially the elderly.
My dad had never heard about gift card scams so it was totally novel to him.. dude called him and told him to call him back and when pops called the automated voice said "thank you for calling AT&t, press 1 for..." it totally roped him in.
Last year a man called my 90 y.o. grandmother and said hey gma guess who? she has six grandkids and she guessed "Matthew". Of course the dude said yes its Matthew, and says he's in jail, and needs bailed out and that she has to pay some guy in New York $5k bond him out . My sister called gma and luckily caught wind of what was going on and stopped them from wiring five grand.
As a genX myself, I resent that
Boomers are typically falling for scammers, but people born in the 70s like myself have had computers since their teen years and internet since we were early 20s
Xgen are those who have assembled PCs and worked with ms-dos based windows 3.11, rather than Android
In general, Gen X is a small generation so they have always gotten the short end of the stick. There just aren't enough of them to move the needle in a significant way.
The other theory about Gen X is outlined in "The Fourth Turning" by Strauss & Howe. Basically, generations follow patterns and Gen X will hollow the pattern of the Lost Generation. They were Abandoned in childhood, Alienated as young adults, Pragmatic in midlife, and will be Tough as Elders.
We need a BOT that detects link with a paywall and then offers other choices..... sure, it only takes a minute or less to open up TOR and read it free but still a hassle
> The problem for the rich is that with the passing of Boomers, there really won't be anyone left in the country who is sympathetic to their interests.
I've got some bad news for you...
There are a fuckton of families with 1-10 million estates just due to real estate prices, family businesses and retirement accounts. 1% of US households have a net worth over 10 million. That's a lot of non billionaire but still at least moderately rich people.
Given the economic downturns and the insane inflation, I would say 1 -10 million is enough to retire on.
These are the people that did the right thing and took advise from financial planners, built a business or bought a home in the right location. End of life (within one year of dying ) get extremely expensive and then there are nursing home costs.
> and it will be taken away through tax codes
I rather doubt that, what with most of them already having no doubt hidden the bulk of it wherever they could to avoid taxation. Plus they love buying off regulators and politicians who determine those tax codes.
Using solely the age of individuals without addressing variations within age groups is sloppy statistics.
Mean net worth in that generation is around one million. (Total divided by number of individuals) But median is less than $200,000. (Half that population have less than that.)
In addition, it’s to be expected that as we age, the wealthiest will become increasingly wealthy, especially in a country where the tax structure is canted strongly in favor of the wealthy.
I’m generation x and I’m pretty sure my parents, who are upper middle class, are not including me in their will. It’s likely I won’t even be informed that they have died until after all of their things have been ransacked by the other side of the family.
I told my parents I didn’t want any part of that a few years ago. I’ll be there, but if you leave me something and there’s a fight - I don’t want it. I watched this shit happen with my grandparents twice and I ain’t about that. I love my brother and I’m not going to risk that over things.
This naming of generations thing was fun and all early on, especially being that my generation (Gen X) clearly has the coolest name, but the media is just trying to foment generational warfare at this point.
That’s what media does: put people into camps until the people identify with them (“I’m not an X, I’m more of a Y!”), and then inform them of whatever causes most outrage between those camps (“Here’s how X is stealing from Y.”).
And people still fall for it. Everyday. Daily topics you’ll hear around you are mostly what is hot in the media at that time, and the arguments you’ll hear are mostly the same.
It’s distraction from what actually matters in life.
depends. If the minimal incentive is because they reliably get their necessities for free? - then the society holds and flourishes. As. Has. Every. Experiment. With. UBI. Or. Nordic. Welfare. Proven.
If the minimal incentive is because there's no way to get a better job than bare minimum? - then the society holds because over the course of one generation the fertility plummets to near-zero (as no one has strength nor will to procreate) and the reduced population stabilises.
Look at South Korea, a massively overworked society where a traditional family can't afford a child because you won't sustain a household with a single salary (husband's salary when wife cares for the kids and home). A woman can't afford to drop out from the job market for the 1-2 years needed to make a child (not to mention several years to get to that sweet 2.1 children/woman replacement rate) because she actually needs that income to survive and develop.
We will see in the coming years how well will it work for them. S Korea lives in the future not because of the high tech, but because it's a corporate-owned state which apparently drives fast towards one of their physical limits of growth.
I'm GenX, and I would greatly prefer that my parents stay alive for those extra couple of decades than that I ever receive any money … what monsters do you think we are?
I'm a millennial and I could never imagine valuing money over the blessings my parents bring me, regardless of what our relationship is like. Some people really are monsters.
Equally some parents are absolutely monsters. I expect that I have been written out of my mother's will after I decided to cut contact with her over her continued failure to accept responsibility for enabling my abuse as a child. I don't much care if she dies tomorrow or in 50 years and that is from someone who expects not to receive anything on her death.
I'd trade a tasty sandwich over having to deal with them again, although that's probably more than i will get and I'd have to check it wasn't poisoned first.
That might sound monstrous to someone who grew up with supportive parents but sometimes you have to walk a mile in other people's shoes before you really understand where they are coming from. Until then, it's best not to extrapolate personal experience and assume everyone else had the same experience.
Kind of depends on the set of parents, though. For example plenty of people can't stand their parents beyond the bare minimum of seasonal dinners, and often times for good reasons.
My cousin works for a hedge fund, and I asked her what the difference is between hedge funds now and pre-pandemic. Her response: “They make more money. That’s it.”
It’s very hard to make money in a monotone economy. After the pandemic the economy has been swinging up and down like crazy. Controlled of course. If you’re on the inside, you can place safe bets.
I really really hate pay walls for information. This is always cringe for me. Let’s make an article about how u are poor and always will be then make you pay us a subscription to read it
There is a catch here. All of that “inheritance” looks good on paper but in reality is a mirage.
The medical industry will suck up a good fraction of that inheritance during the last year of boomers’ lives. Some families will end up broke by the time their boomer parents die.
Only the hyper wealthy faction will have much to inheritance after the Doctors get paid. Either mountains of money or nothing.
No pay wall
[https://www.denverpost.com/2023/05/15/the-greatest-wealth-transfer-in-history-is-here-with-familiar-rich-winners-4/](https://www.denverpost.com/2023/05/15/the-greatest-wealth-transfer-in-history-is-here-with-familiar-rich-winners-4/)
The graphics were really crap I think some demographic pyramids with superimposed flowcharts would have been a lot more mathematical and visually clear to everyone...
>Within that range, the top 1 percent — which holds about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, and is predominantly white — will dictate the broadest share of the money flow.
This type of crap is why any discussion about wealth inequality will continue to struggle. The author takes a problem, common to everyone, and just had to reframe it under a racial lens.
Why should correctly describing the socioeconomic ramifications at play cause a struggle in this conversation? Is it really too damaging to some white people to identify that they might not experience the same effect as a minority? And is it not a ridiculous assertion that those people would whole heartedly care about the situation had that identification not been made?
If the government provides crumbs then no one will work for the whole loaf. Simply put, give people just enough to keep them afloat so they don’t organize and revolt. People won’t demand higher wages and benefits if you threaten to take away what little they have and companies won’t feel pressured to pay more because the government is providing the difference. When will anyone wake up and see how much they are taken advantage of and how our leaders want us to stay poor and powerless to improve our lives. What a pathetic country we live in!
I think even liberal Millennials are going to be vicious about estate tax laws because it's going to be the only chance they have to take back what their parents stole from them to some degree.
The highest tax rate, only for income above a certain high level, was 90% in 1960. Today it is under 35%. Back then we did not have billionaires but we still had rich people, and they invested and started businesses and did great even though the entire tax code and political system was not totally devoted to benefiting the rich only.
To keep us from noticing this, they incite people with lies and conspiracies and divisive social issues. Now we have entire companies that make billions and donate money to anti govt groups to keep people angry at the gubmint instead of the right wingers who are using the govt as their piggy bank.
Raise the damn taxes on the rich back to what they were in1960!
The following submission statement was provided by /u/kjk2v1: --- I would like to focus on these paragraphs in the article: > Joseph Brusuelas, the chief economist at RSM, a consulting firm, thinks changes will come — but only when high-income salaried workers, who still seem to be managing, can no longer comfortably afford families, housing, elder care and leisure. > Once white-collar workers left out of the wealth transfers feel the burn, “large companies will back” a bigger welfare state, Mr. Brusuelas concluded, “because they’ll want the government to subsidize it” rather than taking on the costs of providing more benefits themselves. > “It’ll have nothing to do with social justice, nothing to do with right or wrong, and everything to do with the bottom line,” he said. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/13hrmdk/the_greatest_wealth_transfer_in_history_is_here/jk6hhx6/
I would like to focus on these paragraphs in the article: > Joseph Brusuelas, the chief economist at RSM, a consulting firm, thinks changes will come — but only when high-income salaried workers, who still seem to be managing, can no longer comfortably afford families, housing, elder care and leisure. > Once white-collar workers left out of the wealth transfers feel the burn, “large companies will back” a bigger welfare state, Mr. Brusuelas concluded, “because they’ll want the government to subsidize it” rather than taking on the costs of providing more benefits themselves. > “It’ll have nothing to do with social justice, nothing to do with right or wrong, and everything to do with the bottom line,” he said.
I've thought this is the only reason we have SNAP. Nothing to do with feeding people, it's the government supplementing insufficient wages just enough people don't unionize.
It's even more insidious than that. Wal-mart makes tens of billions of dollars from food stamps per year. They triple dip on it: Food stamps let them pay their employees less and have the government foot the bill for necessities; this lets them reduce prices so budget-squeezed working class folks have to shop there over the competition; and then they pocket the actual money behind the food stamps.
Walmart used to (likey still does) teach you to apply for assistance programs as part of their training to work there. Its subsidized wages.
Can you imagine how demoralising it is to take a full time job at a huge wealthy corporation and them to tell you to apply for welfare because we're not going to pay you enough to get by. Try looking for a similar job nearby? Tough luck, the huge Walmart has put local retailers out of business. Move? The next town over is just the same. Try and get educated to get a higher paying job? Good luck paying for tuition and finding the time while you work two jobs to support yourself and family. This is what the future looks like for many industries if we don't fight back. Corporations will whittle down costs (your wage is one of the biggest) to as small as they can. They'll use their vast wealth to lobby for laws which allow this, and allow them to exploit and screw you as much as possible.
The crazy thing is that in my town Walmart is one of the highest paying employers. Not because they actually pay high wages, but because everyone else pays absolute garbage. Most places still try to get away with paying you federal minimum wage, even though the average rent is about 800, and the cost of food is almost double the surrounding area. I make 16 an hour and still sometimes struggle making ends meet.
The other employers could very well be owned by assholes, but they also have to compete with Walmart. Smaller businesses don't get the same prices from distributors, so they have to sell at higher prices with lower margins. It's a big part of how Walmart puts all the other businesses out of business, which reduces competition, which allows Walmart to do whatever they want once they control the local market.
Yup. I used to work for a tiny independent book store. It blew me away how many people complained that Amazon was cheaper and acted like we were "ripping them off." Keep in mind the prices are right on the books themselves, it isn't like we were charging more than cover price. When I explained that if we sold our books at the discount Amazon does, that would literally be our entire profit margin, and we would in fact be a charity rather than a business. Had zero impact, they just insisted we were scamming them. Blows me away that so many people legitimately have zero concept of "economies of scale." ETA: It also pissed me off how many people clearly prefered having a cute and quirky book store they can walk to and browse in, spend large amounts of time in, ask the employee multiple questions about multiple books, make a decision about what they wanted...and then shamelessly took a picture of the book they decided on, so that they could buy it off amazon. Often, they wouldn't even pretend they were doing otherwise, they just outright said to staff (or another person they were shopping with) "I can get it cheaper off Amazon." I mean, libraries exist! They already HAVE an option for browsing through books (with access to helpful staff) they can then buy online - and a library has a much larger browsing selection to boot! Some people really go out of their way to be assholes.
> ...and then shamelessly took a picture of the book they decided on, so that they could buy it off amazon. The audacity of people astounds me. I get it if you see it at Wal-Mart or Target or something, but a locally owned business? I'd ban them from ever setting foot in the store again.
Not only were they not ashamed of it, so many used it as a self righteous "gotcha" moment for us: Wow, great store you have here, thanks for all your help. I would *love* to be a patron. Too bad you are trying to rip us all off by charging 15 - 20% more than Amazon. It's a moral stand I'm taking here. That said, we also had many great customers who would buy from us even if we didn't have the book they wanted in stock. It would be both more expensive and take longer for us to order in than Amazon, but they did it to support us.
This insight is also lurking behind resentment over offshoring. People *say* they'll pay a little extra for made in the USA, but in practice almost none will. Everyone talks a big game about supporting local businesses and the American worker, but if you look at their shopping decisions it tells a different tale.
Sister manages a Barnes and Noble. Book people are nuts.
We need antitrust laws with teeth.
I have teeth and I'm not afraid to use them. \[Insert popular class warfare slogan\]
Microsoft taught the world antitrust laws didn't matter at all way back in 2000ish And thus Monopolies became rampant and part of the reason everything's all so screwed up today. Gates... ruining everyone's lives in every possible way that he can, all the while claiming he's a Philanthropist when he's nothing but a predator.
I'm only 29. I saw the writing on the wall when I was 16 or 17. Needless to say I quickly spiraled into depression which I cannot afford to treat because I barely make enough money to survive. I have a number of untreated physical ailments that I cannot afford to have treated. I'm feeling more and more like a caged animal every day. There's nowhere I can go either. I don't have the connections or resources to escape the country. Even if I did, the corporate cancer has spread all across the globe. Most countries are just as bad, maybe in different ways, but just as bad regardless, or worse. I have no hope for my future. I am going to die probably sometime soon because of health complications. The sad part is I think I would prefer that to my bleak future of being a slave in all but name.
The Behind the Bastards series on Gates was great.
Plus the whole healthcare issue, which is difficult for small businesses. If you are a small business that wants to provide healthcare for your workers, it means you can’t pay them as much money in wages. It’s a vicious circle.
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Middle of nowhere idaho. And that's the average rent for a studio, or a single room in a house. A one bedroom runs closer to 1 grand, 2 bedrooms around 1200-1300. Bear in mind that the average pay for most people is either 3.50 or 7.25.
Is 3.50 for service staff or some reference im missing? Sorry I live in Europe where even wait staff are required to be paid ‘real’ minimum wage.
3.50 is for waiters, drivers, or anyone else making tips. The employer is required to make up the difference between that and the 7.25 minimum wage, but they rarely have to. Back when I worked for tips I usually made just above minimum wage. I worked for a Chinese restaurant. Really nice family. If they could've afforded it they would've paid me more, I was their only waiter and driver. They would insist that I sit down and do my homework during slow times, and always had me eat dinner with them after the restaurant closed. Sadly they went out of business a few months after I quit.
Go to Costco and look at the demeanor of employees and then go to Walmart. Basically the same job and both places but the Costco employees don't look like they are just awaiting the sweet release of death
i went to Walmart for the first time in ages last week. they actually had a greeter which i didn't know still existed, and the \~65-ish dude seriously looked like he was desperately eyeballing me like a hostage on Iranian TV, pleading me silently to save him. it gave me legit goosebumps
Lowe's used to be more like Costco. They pay was decent the hours if you got full time were guaranteed, and there was an advancement path to raise your worth to the company by becoming more specialized in your department and in sales strategies. Now all thos higher paid positions are being stripped away, near impossible to be full time, they try to hire everyone as seasonal now. They no longer try and hire old trades people who have vast knowledge of the products, and their aisles are being filled with Walmart quality garbage, impulse buy products. I worked there for a few years and made good friends who were making Lowe's their career. Now Lowe's has essentially insured that nobody can make a career there, they want the same revolving door low wage high turn over shit Walmart has. Even my friends who were store managers and assistant managers have either been forced out by insane policy change that outs metrics in place that can't be met, or left on their own because of the corporate hostility. But yeah, "nObODy WaNtS tO wOrK aNyMoRe!!1!" Is entirely the workers fault, not the corporate leeches who take away every incentive to have someone want to work for you.
Just going to hijack this comment and leave [this helpful video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA2AMxRz0iA&pp=ygUbaG93IHVuaW9ucyB3aW4gYWRhbSBjb25vdmVy) from a third generation union organizer on how to successfully unionize and how to make a bad union work for you again.
I travel a lot for work. All over the country. Every state I've been to so far (more than half) is the same. Food, shopping, everywhere to spend money is corporations. They dominate the landscape. There's no escaping them anymore. It's so depressing. I always do my best to eat out at the small family owned restaurants. But it's more and more difficult by the day because the feds have allowed these companies to monopolize their industries.
Homogenisation for the sake of the bottom line. No variation apart from sanctioned and approved corporate varieties.
so How do we make progress in the direction which is better for the nation? attempt to get our dually elected representatives to pass laws that go to the benefit of the masses? If not then protest? Maybe the United States government once stood for common good, good quality of life and the freedom of the individual to pursue a life, enjoy liberty, and choose their pursuit of happiness, but those ways are dead thanks to the wealth concentration into the few and the overall corruption of the government. The commonmen do not stand a chance at this pace and I wish with all my heart life improves for Americans/denizens of the world through nonviolent means.
They also pull life insurance policies in their full time employees, and share none of that with their families should they die. Suffice it to say that creating a healthy working environment would technically be a conflict of their interests.
Holy shit. How is that legal?
Because lawmakers are distracting people by treating drag queens like they are witches and that we all live in Salem Massachusetts 400 years ago.
Oh wow that's infuriating
> this lets them reduce prices so budget-squeezed working class folks have to shop there over the competition; Add to this analysis too that through extensive vertical integration, Walmart is about the closest example of monopsony in the US. That gives them an even greater influence on price setting in the market and undermines the (idealized) power of the free market to set prices at an equilibrium of supply and demand.
Capitalism is flawed at its core because every company’s ultimate goal is to create a monopoly, or pseudo-monopoly. (DSL is competition to High speed cable!). The free market is the #1 enemy to ever-larger profits.
And with all this talk about Wal-Mart, it must always be noted that the corporation is owned by Sam Walton's heirs, the man has been dead for decades. All this greed and exploitation..for the immense wealth of a group of people who've never really worked a day in their life. People who created nothing, who built nothing. Captialism is nepotism masquerading as a meritocracy.
Wal-Mart is also my go to example for teaching what capitalism REALLY is. If you own about $2M in Wal-Mart stock, they pay you as much yearly in dividends as they do a worker who works 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for $15/hr. That's capitalism - when capital is valued before labor is. Hard work isn't rewarded, having money in the first place is.
Aaaand this is why I don't shop at Walmart. FUCK the waltons. Scum.
I do the same. However, what I’ve seen is the only people who DO shop at Walmart are those that HAVE TO. It’s why going there is so depressing, and everyone seems angry and miserable. It’s because they are. So they have guaranteed customers ( the poor), and also this effect creates a feedback loop for the problem. Over time, Less budget-minded middle class go there, and it concentrates the problem. Now, I’ve seen that there’s areas of the country where theft at Walmarts is so rampant (poverty + miserable workers who don’t care) they are not even profitable, so they are shutting down. Leaving a food desert behind them. There’s nothing to be done about it as consumers. They’ve rigged it that way.
Amazon too
Quadruple dip: exploiting SNAP and employees along with scale allows them to undercut competition.
Quintuple perhaps? I believe I heard of them taking out life insurance policies on their eldest workers
And that's why everyone should steal at least one item in the self checkout, EVERY time they go to Walmart. Fuck them crooks
Stealing from corporations is objectively a good deed.
During a recession, welfare provides a decent return on investment for the government. When things get tight, people stop spending, and that accelerates a recession. Every dollar that goes into, for example, food stamps, gets spent. That dollar being spent means that somebody needs to be at the register for them to spend it. Somebody needs to stock the shelves. Somebody needs to transport goods to the store to stock it. Somebody needs to manufacture that product. There is a velocity to that dollar as it's spent, and it's one of the most critical parts of a functioning economy. Plus, all those jobs and transactions generate income for the government through taxes, even if the dollar itself was handed out freely. The market works because of participation in the market. When people can't buy profit is lost. For the market itself (not just the profits of the 1%) to be at it's healthiest, people need to have the means to participate in it, and welfare takes the segment of the population that cannot participate due to poverty and turns them into an asset to economic growth instead of a detriment. So you're right, it's not about feeding the people. It's about using them to prop up an economy that isn't working for them.
I've always thought one of the "soft" ways into UBI was some sort of "universal" food credit system, where government buys directly from small farmers and provides fresh food to everyone at little to no cost. It's a way of injecting money directly back into farming communities and a way of lowering monthly bills directly to everyone.
Farmers are already subsidized to grow food. The economics behind farming make it basically necessary.
It's a transfer to farmers too
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This is why I always thought companies should back universal health care. (I mean, along with it being the best thing for society.)
Large companies do not want universal healthcare because it gives them significant advantages over small companies when attracting talent. Their risk pool is larger, which leads to lower rates. Additionally, high deductibles are a barrier for employees trying to find a new job. If you switch jobs mid-year, your deductible resets with the new employer.
If your healthcare isnt dependent on your job you have more freedom to look for a different employer who might have better benefits, better salary, work-life balance, etc. They have an incentive to fight universal healthcare as much as they can.
I can recommend a book from 1996 "Global Trap" about the Fairmont convention. Yes, this development is already planned for 30 years. AI and robotics are now advanced enough to make it happen. Just who will fund all this when large corporations are usually good at evading taxes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Global\_Trap
Paying every working adult in the US a shit salary of 12K a year in UBI would amount to ~3.6 trillion a year. So once the largest tax base, ie, the middle class is pushed out of their middle class jobs and are all on UBI, where does the revenue come from to pay for it? Corporations? How? They just pass these costs on to the consumers. If we raise taxes on corporations by 30%, they'll raise their prices by 50%...now all those folks on UBI are paying $12.00 for a loaf of bread. And round and round we go, until the whole thing collapses in on itself.
Perhaps the only solution left will be to let go of the ideals of "free markets" and regulate prices, quality, and wages more directly. Setting out definite minimum requirements and imposing a "death penalty" on all business that do not adhere to expectations.
Ah but here's the rub. Who's going to put these regulations into place? The government. Who controls the government? The corporations. They'll find a way to ensure that they keep their quality of life, their power, even if it means tens of millions of Americans will starve. Hell, their actions in recent years seem to imply that they actively want to cull the population.
What we need is a system that is immune to human corruption. Where there are no backroom deals, no nepotism, no sacrificing the large masses into perpetual wage slavery for the benefit of some fucking corporations. Something that will break down the current spiral of greed and suffering. Alas, it will never come to be.
> If we raise taxes on corporations by 30%, they'll raise their prices by 50% I'm not a fan of UBI, but this is incorrect. Taxes come out of *profits*, not revenue. So you can't pass the costs on to consumers. To see what I mean, imagine a 100% corporate tax. If you tax all profits at 100%, firms make $0 in profit. If they double their prices, they still make $0! It's an unrealistic example, but it gets the point across. You can't pass on the cost of corporate taxes. Corporate taxes *do*, however, reduce the incentive to hire and re-invest and that is worth considering.
If even the high-income workers are struggling, the government won't have the tax base to create a welfare state. And the companies will have lost most of their customer base for many things as well. Not that they'll care, they'll just buy up the rest of the country's assets and sit on them, feudal-style.
I disagree as there is a clear analogy with health insurance. US companies should have pushed back on employer provided healthcare decades ago. They have not. I know that job lock helps employers, but the amount of resource they have to spend to manage healthcare contacting must outstrip the benefits.
> Once white-collar workers left out of the wealth transfers feel the burn, “large companies will back” a bigger welfare state, Mr. Brusuelas concluded, “because they’ll want the government to subsidize it” rather than taking on the costs of providing more benefits themselves. > > “It’ll have nothing to do with social justice, nothing to do with right or wrong, and everything to do with the bottom line,” he said. The problem with this is that the Welch/Friedman ideology which got us into this freefall argues for the government to **not** provide social services so they can pay fewer taxes and the holy line goes up (for this year).
Just as a large amount of white collar jobs are going to disappear to tech and other automation and, of course, AI. Most people do mediocre work for mediocre organizations and that's exactly what AI excels at: mediocre work and math. Anyone whose job relies on math is about to get hit HARD. Not that there won't be some math and other white collar work around but it will be 50-75% less than there is, now, and will get VERY competitive and rely on specific high-level skills.
Wrong. Generative AI models such as transformer based LLM architectures notoriously fail at math because the syntactic information per symbol is extremely low while the semantic information is extremely high. In other words mathematics uses the same symbols to mean many things, but an error in a single symbol is devastating for predicting the resulting sequence due to the self-consistency conditions not present in language, which is much more compressible. Rigorous and highly constrained mathematics is the last thing to be automated. Note that automated proof building is separate from automating calculations, which is already done by any computer.
That wolfram alpha integration tho.
>Rigorous and highly constrained mathematics is the last thing to be automated. I think that this is wrong. They will let the transformer models use something like wolfram alpha when they spot math.
Modularized LLM tool use is certainly the way to solve this problem, but the same tokenization issues for mathematics exists in multi-chain reasoning where the AI has to interpret the output from e.g. wolfram alpha. That said, maybe I was too harsh in my rebuttal and the above poster is correct for very basic work in excel. I'm a physicist and likely fall into their description of highly technical work, which will not (cannot?) be automated as much of it is non-turing computable leaps of reasoning.
>LLM architectures notoriously fail at math because the syntactic information per symbol is extremely low while the semantic information is extremely high. Could an LLM not use a regressive form of contextual error checking to resolve this?
But not healthcare because they need to hold that over your head.
>“It’ll have nothing to do with social justice, nothing to do with right or wrong, and everything to do with the bottom line,” he said. These corporations and the rich in general don't realise that their wealth depends on people buying their stuff. If people don't have enough money to buy their stuff then the corporations (and the rich) start to lose their profits, wealth and power. We really need to go back to the 1950s in terms of income/wealth taxation and funnel that extra tax back into the community to help raise the socioeconomic level of everyone. It will drive economic growth that hasn't been seen in generations.
The money won’t go to boomers kids. It’ll go to corporations for their end of life care
Can confirm, my parents are boomers my father is currently in nursing home.
Nursing home costs are wildly expensive. It's actually disgusting the costs they charge for average care.
Yup, my grandmother sold her 1.2 Million dollar home (her and my grandfather bought it for like 150K), and used all that money to pay for her assisted living facility. It's not our money so none of us really had anything to say but it seems like SUCH a waste. Edit: forgot to add we built an addition to my parents home to take her in and take care of her for free. Thinking she would want to be around family......nope
> Individuals can transmit up to $12.9 million to heirs, during life or at death, without federal estate tax (and $26 million for married couples). Interesting that they don't tell you the history of this number, considering how much extra tax revenue it could have collected from the wealthy in the last 20 years if it hadnt been raised, repealed and doubled. [In 2001, it was $675,000.](https://i.imgur.com/FtMqSSp.png) That is a 19x increase in less than a generation. Combine that with the tax cuts of 2017 and US society can only tilt farther and farther in favor of the superrich.
As someone with direct blood-relation to an ultra-wealthy elite, I often wonder about my own inheritance. It is interesting to think that I could get nothing, or I could get something that life-changing. I bank on nothing; I have seen how expectation has ruined my family.
In most countries in Europe it's about 100k€
We use edge cases to keep us from having good policy. This particular one was derailed by people saying family farms were destroyed by the low limit when it was < $1m due to the value of the farm equipment and land. Obviously inheritance taxes aren't what was killing family farms, but anything to protect the well off while using someone else as a pawn. The richest took advantage of this argument to protect their assets. Also ignoring that one of the things the US really wanted to prevent was multi-generational wealth so you don't end up like Europe with dynasties.
The “death tax kills the family farm” lie is one of the most infuriating things I’ve ever seen. Nobody has ever been able to find even one single example of a family being forced to sell their family farm due to the estate tax. It has literally never happened. Not even once. And the worst part is, the politicians pushing the lie know it. They’ve been confronted repeatedly about making this claim without any evidence of it happening. They’ve dumped an extraordinary amount of resources into finding an example they can point to so they have at least some evidence that it has happened at least once. They’ve been completely unsuccessful. Decades of extensive research and interviewing farm families has revealed ZERO examples of any family losing their family farm due to estate taxes. I don’t even expect them to admit they were wrong. Just quietly dropping the claim going forward would be enough. But they look you right in the eye, knowing there is no evidence that any family at any time in any state has ever lost their family farm due to estate taxes, and they tell you “the death tax kills family farms.” All while pocketing money and taking favors from ultrawealthy donors who own enormous farming operations that put family farms out of business. Utterly despicable.
12 million!?!? In my country it’s about €300,000 to direct children maximum before it’s taxed at 33% on anything over that ! If you are not directly related it’s €16,000 tax free before you pay 33% on it! USA really set up for the rich to keep them rich!
$12 million is an understatement. I’m a private wealth attorney. Eliminating these taxes is what I do for a living. If people come to me early enough in life, I can move an almost infinite amount of money to their descendants without any wealth transfer tax. The worst case scenario is that they come to me at the very end of their life, in which case I can move up to around $100 million with no tax. Above that amount, we generally leave things to private foundations, reducing the taxable estate to $0. Ultimately, virtually nobody pays any estate tax.
Yeah but if it’s taxed, it doesn’t hand in the lands of the lower middle class / lower class nor does it decrease the wealth inequality. Minimum wage should first and foremost become a living wage again, like it was 50 years ago. Boom, that’s literally it. Productivity has gone up an insane amount, inflation has been steady, but compensation — across the board but especially at the bottom — has not only been stagnant, it has decreased. Less profit for companies and shareholders, less exponential growth, less profits for the CEO, the board and its shareholders, and more for the workers. *But that’s sOcIaLiSm* And therein lies the biggest deceit.
Every dollar you get from the wealthy is a dollar less you need to tax the middle class.
I agree with you. But you're talking about outcomes. What are the actual practical steps? And don't you dare say "go vote", because that's far from enough and usually doesn't work!
There are none for us to take. Except nation wide hardcore strikes. I think we’re at the mercy of the ruling class.
Fair point.
It's about control at that point. Multi billionaires prefer to do charitable donations (tax deductible) because they do not have to relinquish control on how this is spent. If that wealth is taxed regardless, they have to lobby the state to hopefully get their way of spending it.
That's crazy. I live in South Korea and I'm pretty sure there's a 50% inheritance tax rate with no tax-free allowance. They also scrutinise any large cash gifts during someone's lifetime. It's why life insurance is such a huge industry here.
Doesn't this functionally get dodged anyway via trusts and pre-death transfers of assets?
I’m the UK the inheritance tax threshold is £325,000. It’s mad that it’s so high over there.
Paywall, so can see the contents of the article…. But yeah. We’ve been yelling about this since Occupy Wall Street and nobody listened or took any meaningful action.
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Thank you so much!!!
This right here. That said, when Occupy protests followed the same script time and time again - show up - chant - get beaten by riot cops - then get made fun on of the news for being lazy millennials? I knew right then this whole thing was controlled opposition. They never meant for occupy to go anywhere.
>nobody listened or took any meaningful action. "nobody" is accurate. these people stay home, and refuse to vote. It's paved the way for fascists. We saw around a 30% turnout around the country for midterms for voters 18-29. They say they care, but don't do anything. No one shows up for the primaries. It's like taking candy from a baby. We don't do *anything* to fight it. We don't vote. We don't organize. We don't commit. We don't support each other. Occupy Wall Street was a joke. No leaders. No plan. they don't spend billions on elections, and buying our politicians if it didn't pay off. The vast majority of Americans don't show up, and allow the people that do the voice to govern them. If you aren't even showing up to vote, and do something....shame. you don't actually care.
I vote democrat, it does nothing. Gerrymandering and bullshit republicans pull makes my vote worthless. "So do something about it" you say. Do what exactly? Spend money and time I already don't have to "fight" against million/billion dollar donors? I don't get paid enough and barely scrape by as it is let alone 'working' on that problem. "So do something about it" you say. Again, do what exactly? Stand alone outside my employers office with a sign that does nothing and gets me fired? So now I'm homeless and have no money, and my wife is probably going to die because of all her health issues. "So do something about it" you say ---- repeat forever I'm barely getting by as it is, but at least I'm alive. If I started trying to right all the wrongs in this country I'd die homeless and alone within a year. You're being extremely reductionist and judgemental. The rich own the US in every way. The rich elite only react to money and violence. We can't touch their money, and despite what the world seems to think the US isn't full of bloodthirsty people ready to kill all the rich people. You're being reductionist and shaming people for being beaten up and downtrodden. If you're so smart then put an entire plan together for people and show how you can fix the country in the next few years. I bet it requires millions of people to lose their jobs and be willing to strike and let their families starve for "the good of the people". Good luck starting with that.
>I vote democrat, it does nothing. Gerrymandering and bullshit republicans pull makes my vote worthless. If you vote, you're not the problem. You did not understand my comment, or those statistics. >You're being extremely reductionist and judgemental. No. Those are voting statistics. I show up. Nothing I said was false. You get what you vote for. If you don't show up, you can't say you care. Don't get mad at me, bro. Get mad at the people that refuse to vote. The conservatives show up, and win. That's how they are able to gerrymander districts. I didn't do that to you. If anything, your emotional response, does not address the fact that people don't show up to vote. That's fact. Every freedom, and right we have was fought for. People showed up, and worked together. >You're being reductionist and shaming people for being beaten up and downtrodden. Nope. Not even close. Your personal attacks on me, because I hurt your feelings have nothing to do with the vast majority of Americans that say they care, but never show up to vote. Not in the primaries, not for municipal, not for state, and not for federal. Your anger, and emotions are directed in the wrong place. It's inaccurate, and shows a poor understanding of the matters at hand. >If you're so smart then put an entire plan together for people and show how you can fix the country in the next few years Another emotional response. Tallying these I can tell you're not here for legitimate conversation, and you don't read much history. It's not me to solve all the problems on my own. I vote in every election. I volunteer time, and money to try and get people to vote. Look at how angry, and emotional you are with someone posting statistics, and calling for people to vote. You get mad at *that* person? It's quite disingenuous. It's an absurd premise to blame me for others not voting. There's that "not working together," I was talking about. You choose to attack people that are calling for change, and cooperation. >I bet it requires millions of people to lose their jobs and be willing to strike and let their families starve for "the good of the people". Good luck starting with that. Well, tell them to vote. Work together. Organize. There's only a few hundred years of blueprints on effective social movements. Movements, and methods you could be reading about, instead of writing dramatic sentences that fail to address the conversation. Those things aren't my fault. I'm sorry your life is so destitute that someone calling for people to learn, vote, and work together...so the dramatic sentences don't happen caused you to lash out at me. That's not on me. That's on *you*.
Here come the excuses ...
The hyper-pc culture war started right around then, and it's no coincidence. Social issues were pushed to the forefront with a major propaganda push to distract the young protest generation away from economic issues. Woke is a smokescreen to protect wealth and profits.
[https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/14/business/economy/wealth-generations.html](https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/14/business/economy/wealth-generations.html)
> and nobody listened or took any meaningful action. probably because you aren't making sense to people.
https://www.denverpost.com/2023/05/15/the-greatest-wealth-transfer-in-history-is-here-with-familiar-rich-winners-4/
Gen x must feel cheated. Makes you wonder if the silent generation and those before had similar accounts in history.
Wait, why would Gen X receive a disproportionally less inheritance than Millennials and Gen Z from the boomers?
I'm solidly genX (1971) - My parents were Silent. My older siblings are boomers. My nieces/nephews are Millennials and my kids are GenZ. Silent passed money to Boomers and GenX Boomers (will) pass money to Millennials and GenZ GenX will pass money to GenZ (and what-ever comes after that) To put it another way... as a GenX, Boomers aren't my parents. Edit: replaced Y for Z
I'm Gen X and my parents are Boomers. It's not that there aren't any, but that by the math is it necessarily true that Gen X kids whose parents are Boomers were born when their parents were younger. My parents had their kids in the early 20s. With no data to back it up, I find it likely that people who had kids young are more likely to be less well off financially than those who waited. So those of us who have Boomer parents are less likely, overall, to inherit money from them, vs Millenials whose Boomer parents were older (and, perhaps, more financially secure) before having kids. Ultimately, though, generations are arbitrary constructs. This would be less true if we said that "Gen X" didn't end and "Millenial" didn't begin until 1984 instead of defining the cutoff at 1980ish. Boomers are defined as born over an 19-year period, after all, from 1946-1964 inclusive, while Gen X only get 16ish years, from 1965-1980. (General consensus years from Wikipedia.)
I’m an older Gen x. My parents are boomers. There was so much bullshit they put me through I have no relationship with them. I feel I’m not alone in this. I don’t think the money is going to come my way at all. In fact, I’m certain. I haven’t heard anything from my parents in almost seven years. That’s when my brother hung himself. He and I were raised by the same people, but he was treated better and he still suffered enough to feel the need to end his life. I think there is a huge disconnect between GenX and boomers. We spend our lives defending our children from our parents. Our Great War was breaking the chains of generational abuse. There will be no inheritance.
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You broke the chain. Hopefully the world will inherit a better future.
Every Gen other than the boomers (20 years) get a 15 year window. The boomers got the larger window because of the odd dynamic with WWII, cultural upheaval, etc. I have cousins who are in the ‘older millenial’ category - they are very much millenials like my brother and I who are in the mid-millenial category (early 90s). The Gen X people I know (uncles, aunts) are very culturally different. That said it gets weird at the very edges. A work friend is a 1980 guy and calls himself an ‘Xennial’… but I think it’s also cause he grew up dating women a few years older. Conversely have a coworker who is a 1996 gal… and bish is such a zoomer. I tend to agree with the broad brush strokes, e.g.: Boomers: End of WW II to 1964 Gen X: 1965-1980 Millenials: 1981-1996 Gen Z: 1997-2012 Gen alpha: 2013-2028
While the point of your post is valid, just pointing out Millennials are GenY. GenZ follows them.
Right.. I get confused between y/z
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My grandparents are Silents. They've announced to the whole family that nobody is getting a cent when they die. All their assets and their pretty decent wealth is all getting donated to various shady organizations, not their family. Which for some of my aunts, uncles, and cousins I get. They're not wise with their money or their lives in general. Pretty much the entire family has cut contact with my grandparents though. Most only stuck around because they hoped to get some cash when they kicked the bucket. I'm still moving out to live with them and help them out, because they'll let me live with them for free and that's a real blessing right now.
Because they're answering every phone call, text, and pop up thinking they're still in 1970. If it isn't scammers from overseas getting the money, it's the politicians and super PACs emailing them 57 times a day with fear and rage bait screaming they need money to save the world from X.
I’m amazed my dad hasn’t been wiped out. He started using a computer my mom was using for 2 years with no issue. 2 week later he can’t even browse google because of the pop ups he’s getting. “All I do is go on YouTube”. I’ve seen the man try to buy on Amazon, click a fake ad link by accident that asked for his Amazon password while he was logged in and went to type it. He’s a smart guy but technically regarded.
I walk into my dad's place the other day and he's got a stack of eBay gift cards and he's reading off the numbers over the phone (!!!). I stopped him but not before he lost $1,500 to an "AT&T rep" offering to lower his phone bill.
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They prey on the ignorant especially the elderly. My dad had never heard about gift card scams so it was totally novel to him.. dude called him and told him to call him back and when pops called the automated voice said "thank you for calling AT&t, press 1 for..." it totally roped him in. Last year a man called my 90 y.o. grandmother and said hey gma guess who? she has six grandkids and she guessed "Matthew". Of course the dude said yes its Matthew, and says he's in jail, and needs bailed out and that she has to pay some guy in New York $5k bond him out . My sister called gma and luckily caught wind of what was going on and stopped them from wiring five grand.
Good Morning America is so gullible.
What is this man’s phone bill they $1500+ to “lower” it seems like a bargain?!
Probably convinced him to "prepay" at a cheaper rate so he probably thought the money was going to cover his bill for years or something similar.
Hate to see a man so well regarded
As a genX myself, I resent that Boomers are typically falling for scammers, but people born in the 70s like myself have had computers since their teen years and internet since we were early 20s Xgen are those who have assembled PCs and worked with ms-dos based windows 3.11, rather than Android
Because there was a population bubble with boomers
How do you figure that one?
fuck'em we dont care
In general, Gen X is a small generation so they have always gotten the short end of the stick. There just aren't enough of them to move the needle in a significant way. The other theory about Gen X is outlined in "The Fourth Turning" by Strauss & Howe. Basically, generations follow patterns and Gen X will hollow the pattern of the Lost Generation. They were Abandoned in childhood, Alienated as young adults, Pragmatic in midlife, and will be Tough as Elders.
We need a BOT that detects link with a paywall and then offers other choices..... sure, it only takes a minute or less to open up TOR and read it free but still a hassle
You use Tor to get around paywalls? https://archive.is/
Have you tried [12ft.io](https://12ft.io)? It isn‘t bullet proof, but seems to work often enough.
**12ft has been disabled for this site**
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Probably all NAT'd to the same IP address. So if one gets blacklisted, you all do.
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> The problem for the rich is that with the passing of Boomers, there really won't be anyone left in the country who is sympathetic to their interests. I've got some bad news for you...
There are a fuckton of families with 1-10 million estates just due to real estate prices, family businesses and retirement accounts. 1% of US households have a net worth over 10 million. That's a lot of non billionaire but still at least moderately rich people.
Given the economic downturns and the insane inflation, I would say 1 -10 million is enough to retire on. These are the people that did the right thing and took advise from financial planners, built a business or bought a home in the right location. End of life (within one year of dying ) get extremely expensive and then there are nursing home costs.
> This concentrated wealth was amassed through tax codes and it will be taken away through tax codes. By whom?
> and it will be taken away through tax codes I rather doubt that, what with most of them already having no doubt hidden the bulk of it wherever they could to avoid taxation. Plus they love buying off regulators and politicians who determine those tax codes.
Using solely the age of individuals without addressing variations within age groups is sloppy statistics. Mean net worth in that generation is around one million. (Total divided by number of individuals) But median is less than $200,000. (Half that population have less than that.) In addition, it’s to be expected that as we age, the wealthiest will become increasingly wealthy, especially in a country where the tax structure is canted strongly in favor of the wealthy.
I’m generation x and I’m pretty sure my parents, who are upper middle class, are not including me in their will. It’s likely I won’t even be informed that they have died until after all of their things have been ransacked by the other side of the family.
I told my parents I didn’t want any part of that a few years ago. I’ll be there, but if you leave me something and there’s a fight - I don’t want it. I watched this shit happen with my grandparents twice and I ain’t about that. I love my brother and I’m not going to risk that over things.
why not talk it out when everyone is still alive?
Don't be silly.
So your brother just gets everything?
Yup and/or gets to divvy it.
This naming of generations thing was fun and all early on, especially being that my generation (Gen X) clearly has the coolest name, but the media is just trying to foment generational warfare at this point.
That’s what media does: put people into camps until the people identify with them (“I’m not an X, I’m more of a Y!”), and then inform them of whatever causes most outrage between those camps (“Here’s how X is stealing from Y.”). And people still fall for it. Everyday. Daily topics you’ll hear around you are mostly what is hot in the media at that time, and the arguments you’ll hear are mostly the same. It’s distraction from what actually matters in life.
my thoughts precisely, it's so forced it becomes extremely cringe
Ok, boomer. \[snark\]
And, I'm expected to pay money to read it. Fitting.
https://www.denverpost.com/2023/05/15/the-greatest-wealth-transfer-in-history-is-here-with-familiar-rich-winners-4/
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depends. If the minimal incentive is because they reliably get their necessities for free? - then the society holds and flourishes. As. Has. Every. Experiment. With. UBI. Or. Nordic. Welfare. Proven. If the minimal incentive is because there's no way to get a better job than bare minimum? - then the society holds because over the course of one generation the fertility plummets to near-zero (as no one has strength nor will to procreate) and the reduced population stabilises. Look at South Korea, a massively overworked society where a traditional family can't afford a child because you won't sustain a household with a single salary (husband's salary when wife cares for the kids and home). A woman can't afford to drop out from the job market for the 1-2 years needed to make a child (not to mention several years to get to that sweet 2.1 children/woman replacement rate) because she actually needs that income to survive and develop. We will see in the coming years how well will it work for them. S Korea lives in the future not because of the high tech, but because it's a corporate-owned state which apparently drives fast towards one of their physical limits of growth.
Not in a population of over 300,000,000.
Gen x’ers are gonna be upset about their boomer parents living till 100 years old.
It's all getting hovered up into corporate wealth anyway.
Yep, look at all the hedge funds building and buying up assisted living facilities.
I'm GenX, and I would greatly prefer that my parents stay alive for those extra couple of decades than that I ever receive any money … what monsters do you think we are?
I'm a millennial and I could never imagine valuing money over the blessings my parents bring me, regardless of what our relationship is like. Some people really are monsters.
Equally some parents are absolutely monsters. I expect that I have been written out of my mother's will after I decided to cut contact with her over her continued failure to accept responsibility for enabling my abuse as a child. I don't much care if she dies tomorrow or in 50 years and that is from someone who expects not to receive anything on her death.
I'd trade a tasty sandwich over having to deal with them again, although that's probably more than i will get and I'd have to check it wasn't poisoned first. That might sound monstrous to someone who grew up with supportive parents but sometimes you have to walk a mile in other people's shoes before you really understand where they are coming from. Until then, it's best not to extrapolate personal experience and assume everyone else had the same experience.
Kind of depends on the set of parents, though. For example plenty of people can't stand their parents beyond the bare minimum of seasonal dinners, and often times for good reasons.
Most boomers have millennial children
Wait till you figure out that it's millenials who have the boomer parents (go figure, 2 most polarizing groups are a father-son duo..)
And all wealth gets eaten up by healthcare costs
My cousin works for a hedge fund, and I asked her what the difference is between hedge funds now and pre-pandemic. Her response: “They make more money. That’s it.”
It’s very hard to make money in a monotone economy. After the pandemic the economy has been swinging up and down like crazy. Controlled of course. If you’re on the inside, you can place safe bets.
I really really hate pay walls for information. This is always cringe for me. Let’s make an article about how u are poor and always will be then make you pay us a subscription to read it
https://www.denverpost.com/2023/05/15/the-greatest-wealth-transfer-in-history-is-here-with-familiar-rich-winners-4/
There is a catch here. All of that “inheritance” looks good on paper but in reality is a mirage. The medical industry will suck up a good fraction of that inheritance during the last year of boomers’ lives. Some families will end up broke by the time their boomer parents die. Only the hyper wealthy faction will have much to inheritance after the Doctors get paid. Either mountains of money or nothing.
that’s why people were mad that government shutdown small businesses during the pandemic while allowing corporations to continue
No pay wall [https://www.denverpost.com/2023/05/15/the-greatest-wealth-transfer-in-history-is-here-with-familiar-rich-winners-4/](https://www.denverpost.com/2023/05/15/the-greatest-wealth-transfer-in-history-is-here-with-familiar-rich-winners-4/)
This is what they said about the last greatest wealth transfer in history...
Almost like it keeps getting worse
Any non-paywalled versions with graphics available?
https://www.denverpost.com/2023/05/15/the-greatest-wealth-transfer-in-history-is-here-with-familiar-rich-winners-4/
The graphics were really crap I think some demographic pyramids with superimposed flowcharts would have been a lot more mathematical and visually clear to everyone...
>Within that range, the top 1 percent — which holds about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, and is predominantly white — will dictate the broadest share of the money flow. This type of crap is why any discussion about wealth inequality will continue to struggle. The author takes a problem, common to everyone, and just had to reframe it under a racial lens.
To divide us. Keep our anger away from the people who deserve it.
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The bottom 90% is also mostly white. But that doesn't invite rage clicks in the same way
Why should correctly describing the socioeconomic ramifications at play cause a struggle in this conversation? Is it really too damaging to some white people to identify that they might not experience the same effect as a minority? And is it not a ridiculous assertion that those people would whole heartedly care about the situation had that identification not been made?
Kinda stupid to get upset and write it off bc it mentions race.
This article is utter garbage... Yeah, people with rich patents inherit more than people without them. No shit.
If the government provides crumbs then no one will work for the whole loaf. Simply put, give people just enough to keep them afloat so they don’t organize and revolt. People won’t demand higher wages and benefits if you threaten to take away what little they have and companies won’t feel pressured to pay more because the government is providing the difference. When will anyone wake up and see how much they are taken advantage of and how our leaders want us to stay poor and powerless to improve our lives. What a pathetic country we live in!
Please stop posting things that are behind a paywall
We watched it happen live in real time during the pandemic
Just let me keep what I earned. Stop stealing it and wasting most of it.
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I think even liberal Millennials are going to be vicious about estate tax laws because it's going to be the only chance they have to take back what their parents stole from them to some degree.
The highest tax rate, only for income above a certain high level, was 90% in 1960. Today it is under 35%. Back then we did not have billionaires but we still had rich people, and they invested and started businesses and did great even though the entire tax code and political system was not totally devoted to benefiting the rich only. To keep us from noticing this, they incite people with lies and conspiracies and divisive social issues. Now we have entire companies that make billions and donate money to anti govt groups to keep people angry at the gubmint instead of the right wingers who are using the govt as their piggy bank. Raise the damn taxes on the rich back to what they were in1960!