According to the central bank, those born between 1981 and 1996, better known as Millennials, control only 4.6% of the wealth in the country even though they make up the majority of the workforce, with around 72 million people.
While it is not unusual for younger people to accumulate
Good news, that’s the real trickle down economics, inheritances!
But on a more serious note, it’s not that good a comparison, what we need to check is what % of the wealth the previous generations controlled at this point in their history (when the generation was in its mid twenties to early forties) because they too were the biggest workforce without owning most of the wealth, that’s just how things go, you accumulate wealth over time, they have decades ahead of us. They surely owned more than we do now, but it’s certainly not as big a difference.
In the end what I’m seeing is just another piece to divide those at the bottom so they don’t pay attention to the people that truly own a disproportionate amount, like Zuckerberg that owns 2% of the millennial’s wealth. This guy is 0.000000003% of US’s population and owns close to 0.1% of its population’s wealth.
That inheritance money that people keep mentioning is going straight to exploitative elder care, I promise. We will hardly see a dime. Source: My dad is older than the boomers and was a white collar worker. I’ve seen the receipts.
Not only that, the boomers are just starting to go into those systems, so it’s pretty obvious that there are opportunists within the industry salivating for this impending cash cow. Once the boomers enter the system in larger numbers, costs across the board are going to skyrocket as well (rapid expansion costs money, baby) with cascading and anti human effects that ripple across other parts of life just like all of the other venture capital unregulated bullshit (something something stonks in elder care to the moon). Venture capital will factory farm your parents for every penny they have left.
The main point of my comment was everything that came after, not the joke at the beginning.
Agree that comparisons like the one you’ve described are helpful, and soften the blow of this thread’s headline, but they shouldn’t be used as an excuse, as they do show a rather disappointing generational wealth gap:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/03/precariousness-modern-young-adulthood-one-chart/
Yeah as I said it still doesn’t look good, but having generations fighting each other is still just a way to not have us fight the people who truly are responsible. I’m sure the majority of boomers wouldn’t be happy to see that their kids and grandkids are getting poorer and poorer, they’re just getting manipulated into indirectly voting for that (just like people from all generations are).
All that to say, fuck you Reagan.
Precisely this. Everything regarding boomers and wealth accumulation is nothing more than culture wars and a race to the bottom. The real enemy are those that have manipulated politics to allow them to abuse labour laws and taxes. We should not be looking at why some have did well in life, we should be looking at why some are not. It should not be a race to the bottom, it should be about getting more for for those who deserve it.
No one pushing these culture wars like to highlight just how tax systems have changed in the last 80 years.
All the while governments across the world have added loopholes to facilitate tax evasion on a massive scale.
Median earnings have gone up 2% in real terms since 1980. But the disparity between those who have and have not has changed in favour of the richest. The poorest are now much worse off than they have been since the 80s, and the richer are vastly richer.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/185369/median-hourly-earnings-of-wage-and-salary-workers/
Old people have a lot more retirement savings than young people. It’s often said that a safe withdrawal rate is 4%, so an IRA with $1 million in it can only support a $40k/year retirement.
Compounded returns also add up over time. Using a retirement calculator, if you have $0 at 20, make 60k/year, contribute 10% of your salary ($500/month) to your IRA, get 6% returns a year, inflation is 3% and you get a 2% raise a year, then at 40 you’ll have saved $282k and at 66 you’ll have saved almost $2 million.
Due to the way retirement works in this country, you expect older people to have much more wealth than young people if they ever want to retire.
So yeah, without historical context this comparison is pretty useless.
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